Religion Dispatches
First, let me say I composed this entry starting from SFO airport en route to Philadelphia. This means I can no longer control formats and things like marking foreign words with italics. I think some people know that in my past life I was an academic. So things like format and italics make a difference. But I can’t get what I want with the Ipad, as far as word processing goes. That may be a blessing in disguise. I mean, I can always blame things…
Read More…s the stereotype of the Muslim extremist—and he knows it. Imagine me in an airport, he says, you can make your own joke there. Allah Made me Funny was produced by Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), which is, “a non-profit educational foundation that works through the media to produce films and documentaries that serve the causes of peace and understanding.” UPF explicitly states that they want their vision to be a catalyst for ending the “clash o…
Read More…eing detained by police after he “was subjected to a lynch attempt” at the airport in Istanbul after he was deported from Northern Cyprus after he posted a provocative video on social media on New Year’s Eve that reportedly said “Are you still celebrating the New Year while so many journalists are under arrest, so many children are being harassed or raped, corruption and bribery are over the top, and bigots share crap on the streets together with…
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…s probably thought Kamal Saleem represented Islam. But on the drive to the airport that disappointment lifted. America is in crisis, as Engle warned, but its solution can be intimated in the popular energy that has animated engagement from Wisconsin to Wall Street to Tahrir—on the way to the airport, I drove past Occupy Detroit. Our imaginations are once more open, as we consider the incompatibilities of unchecked capital and genuine democracy. In…
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…necting flight departing from, of all places, Houston’s Bush International Airport, visions of interesting frogs and secluded beaches began to recede in my mind as I became fixated on what seemed to be a disturbingly justified question about the citizens of the United States: Are we, um, stupid? When I arrived in Panama, I made my way over to Bocas del Toro, an insanely beautiful and ethnically diverse archipelago in the Caribbean that is popular…
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…Walcott Avenue to be exact). It’s become a statistic to keep track of: the number of school-age children who are murdered, sometimes on school grounds, during a school year, which means the academic year is properly hyphenated. The punctuation gives bone to the unholy facts, but it also creates another set of suburban record-keeping to conjure with. In other words, it makes the reality more abstract, a bit easier to study as citizens. I teach in D…
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…tters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, pre…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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…napped (tooken) and held hostage for fifteen years by the Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. The sole voluntary congregant, Gretchen, “just thought [the Reverend] had some real good ideas,” and recruits four additional members once “saved” from the bunker. From the show’s perspective, Gretchen is “tooken,” not only from her previous life in Durnsville, Indiana, but also for a ride. Kimmy refuses to give up on Gretchen: “I know there’s still hope,…
Read More…d lesbian groups and straight allies have been quick to praise him for it. Wayne Besen at Truth Wins Out, one of the organizers of the American Prayer Hour, a progressive Christian response to the breakfast created by the C Street group, “The Family,” who have influenced the Ugandan legislation, issued a glowing statement: We applaud President Obama for having the courage to confront those responsible for the heinous anti-gay bill in Uganda, said…
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