Religion Dispatches
…getting too many days off. More atheist billboards, this time in Florida. Denver Broncos rookie Tim Tebow has added a tonsure haircut to his mix of evangelical Christianity and football. The new do has drawn comparisons between the former Florida Gator star and Saint Francis of Assisi. Then there’s the question of why the usual scripture citation on Tebow’s eye-black didn’t make in onto the cover of the latest NCAA football video game. Perhaps to…
Read More
…rontational, but several times during our conversation, I felt like I was flashing back to another lifetime, when I shared the same fundamentalist worldview as the Captains, perceiving “the World, the flesh, and the devil” as tangible enemies intent on deceiving believers into forsaking eternal life. (For all the Salvation Army’s good works, they are still an extremely conservative church, where a rogue Australian officer recently suggested that g…
Read More
…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
Read More
…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…
Read More
…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…
Read More…tions ravenous for rights, dignity, and prosperity. In short, thank the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, for a big order signed on the occasion of President Obama’s visit (230 planes at $21.7 billion!). And thank one of the world’s fastest-growing airlines, Emirates from Dubai, for the other (50 jets at $18 billion). So here’s to cooperation of the civilizations. Here’s to throwing facts in the face of faux analysis. While Victoria Jackso…
Read More
…Purnama, a Christian, was sentenced this month to two years in prison for blasphemy. Responding to Sunday’s Jakarta raid, Charliyan told reporters in Bandung, the capital of West Java, a province with a population of about 47 million, that LGBT people suffered a “disease of the body and soul”. He called on the public to report their activities. “I hope there are no followers in West Java, no gay or LGBT lifestyle or tradition, Charliyan said. ”If…
Read More
…y is that it is not limited to religiopolitical violence. Lankford cites a number of American suicide terrorists that exhibited “classic suicidal traits.” Like Joseph Stack, a divorced software engineer with tax problems. In 2010, Stack crashed his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; “There isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken [with me],” Stack wrote in the…
Read More…You may, however, wake up where you didn’t expect to, such as beside your slashed tires in the mosque parking lot—but you deserved it. Many Muslims, especially in Muslim countries, bounce between various mosques, looking for better khutbahs (see entry before last), awesome qira’ah (Qur’an recitation), or good-looking ‘sisters’—we don’t date our actual sisters; calm down, right-wing. If they’re leaving roundabout taraweeh, that special late-night M…
Read More…at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “…
Read More