Religion Dispatches
…doing so, to comments my father used to make about turning various Middle East countries into parking lots by the use of nuclear devices. Hedges writes: Militarism crushes the capacity for moral autonomy and difference. It isolates us from each other. It has is logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and yes, our gay…
Read More…Ruth, hosted their annual Christmas dinner at “Rosa Mexicana” on the posh East Side. The boys were not there. The following morning, December 11th, Bernie Madoff was arrested, and the story erupted. Neither of the sons has seen their father since the 10th of December. They have not visited him in the Metropolitan Correctional Center where he awaits sentencing on June 29, not even when they were serving jury duty literally next door. But is this a…
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…ity” ode (and readers who, like me, once memorized these lines should feel free to recite them aloud): Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Up…
Read More…te in 1870. And Mormon women in the late nineteenth century were sent back east to train as medical doctors, encouraged by Brigham Young himself, who said in 1869: We believe that women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds and raise babies, but they should stand behind the counter, study law or physic, or become good bookkeepers and be able to do the business in any counting house, and all this to enlarge their sphere of us…
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…vari. I get that it’s about the origins of modern Europe, but why does the East have to be such a malicious place? What’s your next book? I’m working on three novels, a proper trilogy, that I can best describe as a cross between science fiction, Bollywood, and alternative history. The first, Americans, takes place in the 21st and 17th centuries, and tells the story of two best friends who get stranded outside each other’s timelines and try to find…
Read More…ove for Allah: as the greatest principle of Islam. My own shaykh is on the east coast and a visit to him and some time in retreat is already on my calendar after I visit with my family. What was particularly striking for me last night, is that this particular company among Sufis was also made up of mostly well-educated, American professionals, over 50. Let me be direct here about what it means to say that one is American in the context of identity…
Read More…recrimination is rendered moot. And still worse: Name your war as a battle between good and evil, and it is sure to be “uncompromising.” You do not negotiate with, and you do not talk to, the enemy; you simply demand unconditional surrender and envision a world in which all of your opponents have been captured or killed. As the Roman historian, Tacitus, put it two millennia ago: “They create a desert and call this peace.” The final legacy of the s…
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…lity of the Defense of Marriage Act could precipitate “a national conflict between church and state of enormous proportions.”) But today in the Guardian, Andrew Brown argues that the pope “didn’t say gay marriage threatens humanity”: The pope is a Catholic; perhaps it’s in the nature of the news business to be freshly astonished by this fact every couple of months. It’s also true that the Vatican bureaucracy is arrogant, secretive, suspicious of o…
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…rried priests serving under the jurisdiction of Rome. Byzantine Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians who have entered into communion with Rome, maintain the Eastern Orthodox practice around clerical celibacy, allowing married men to be ordained to the diaconate and priesthood, though not the episcopacy (i.e. bishop). The Catholic Church also allows married clergymen who convert to Catholicism to, on a case-by-case basis, be ordained into the Cat…
Read More…ked by Iran) make a mockery of simplistic schemas to understand the Middle East. But sometimes, it seems, there is one and one motive alone that trumps all, which unites forces that would otherwise find themselves at opposite ends of global affairs. Consider this excerpt from the Times’ article: After the missiles were shown destroying Syrian military helicopters, the matter took an unusual turn when a state-controlled newspaper in China, apparent…
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