Religion Dispatches
…of polarization has been sharpened by recent controversies: the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, the Pope’s remarks about Islam, and whether face-veils hinder integration, as a few examples that have set relations between Islam and the West on edge. Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington introduced the theory of a “clash of civilizations” we are witnessing today. Does such a fundamental incompatibility between the “Christian West” and the “Mu…
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…she’s got everything I need, A breeze in the pines and the sun and bright moonlight, lazing in the sunshine yes indeed. ~ “Sugar Magnolia” My childhood home was equidistant between two of the Grateful Dead’s regular Bay Area venues: Berkeley’s Greek Theater and Oakland’s Kaiser Convention Center. When the Deadheads came to Berkeley, they camped in the parking lot behind my high school, and when they came to Oakland, they camped behind my mother’s…
Read More…ght legitimately ask: “Why, of all things, a piece devoted to Satanists?” Good question. First off, while the year in religion didn’t go too well, as Daniel Schultz points out in his wrap-up, it was the Satanists who managed to give us a couple of the brighter spots. Second, despite the temptation to assume that Satanism is essentially a sophisticated group of pranksters with a flair for the dramatic–”part of an incredibly elaborate mockumentary,”…
Read More…hired bus drivers to drive people to the polls. They have walked neighborhoods to sign people up to vote. They have wheeled in senior citizens to the polls to vote and helped them do so.” Oooohh. Signs? Busses? Rides to the polls? Signing people up to vote? So let me get this right: she, and the chorus of fawning commenters on her blog, are worried that some of our neighbors who haven’t traditionally voted because they find it difficult to do so…
Read MoreIn popular parlance the phrase “Is this kosher?” has nothing to do with food, or with ritual purity; it refers to the “rightness,” or justice, of something. Of course “kosher” never did refer only to a certain slaughtering process or a particular set of prayers; it involves a whole set of ethical standards. Kosher meat processing owners discovered this broader principle when their workers sought to organize unions. Two years ago in the Midwest, t…
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…rora, Colorado movie theater, The Telegraph published a “history of mass shootings in the U.S. since Columbine”—a list of nearly 30 shooting sprees with lethal results. Ne’er-do-wells who merely wounded didn’t make the cut. Thus, not included on the list was a shooting spree in an Alabama bar with a multiple arson warm-up just two days earlier. There, enraged after having been fired from his job (only the latest in a string of personal and financi…
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…t struck me, when reading Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s review of Magic in the Moonlight—in which she notes that Woody Allen’s film is “based on a story that’s almost too good to be true”—that attention to Allen’s true historical referents only complicates things for the better. For the magician referenced by Colin Firth’s “Stanley Crawford” is not Harry Houdini—or, not Houdini only—but (also) Chung Ling Soo, née Billy Robinson. And Robinson is far mor…
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…acks) didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us” seemed oh-too-true. Teaching American religious history was just a reminder of how a religious narrative for others could be simply faith, and for others, a mode of survival, a way out of no way. Now, I can revisit that history with a fresh hope. I have no illusions that racism is over, or that even the institutions we all teach at will immediately rectify their inherent racial biases…
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…hers use something called the “children’s dictator game,” a.k.a. stickerpalooza. Here’s how it worked: Step one. Go to an elementary school. Find a child. Place a set of 30 stickers in front of the child. Tell the child to pick her favorite ten. Step two. Introduce a plot twist. Tell the kid that not everyone in school could participate in the sticker bonanza. Fortunately, there is a chance to share: the kid can pick between zero and 10 of her fav…
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…ed a bit: “I went up to her and said, ‘Ma’am, please leave, we have understood you, we have made a (path),’” Garza recalled. “She said, ‘Go? Back in my day, this is what we did,’ basically, and then she hailed Hitler.” Garza posted his own recollection of the incident on Facebook the same night: The woman pictured with me and what looks to be her husband we’re stragglers in the pack, and started responding to people’s jeers. Some guy ripped a sign…
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