Religion Dispatches
…u) with health and peace.” I think in the United States, we take ours from South Asia and just say ‘Id Mubarak, “blessed ‘Id,” with the response, ‘Id Karim, “noble or generous ‘Id.” And everywhere there is food. So much food you can see why such a rigorous fast does not produce the world’s thinnest people: they’d eat it all back during the three-day celebration. And that’s what is should be: three days of celebration. The part that puts the ‘holy’…
Read More
…freaked. I called my editor in a panic and told her there’s no way I could promote a book that made me so uncomfortable just to look at it. I told her it looked like gay erotica. She disagreed, saying she thought it was a warm and inviting cover. “But, see, you live in San Francisco,” I told her. “I live in South Carolina. In San Fran that may be warm and inviting, here, that’s called porn.” The only good thing was that the font had changed to wha…
Read More…ips, like the religiously conservative Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, repealed their prohibitions against interracial dating. In 1989, the Southern Baptist convention passed a resolution on race in which they vowed to “repent of any past bigotry and pray for those who are still caught in its clutches.” The “debate” over interracial marriage, and the racism that undergirded its ban, did not end – but the conversation changed fr…
Read More
…have a connective thread. The main protagonists (Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Senator John Ensign of Nevada, and former Arkansas Congressman Chip Pickering) were all one-time residents of C Street and members of the Family, otherwise known as the Fellowship. As the summer unfurled, the “three amigos” gave mainstream media outlets plenty to talk about, and this highly secretive and powerful right-wing group got a lot of exposure. And t…
Read More
…x-Stripper: Priest is my baby’s father—and I want him to pay.” Before I go south and start to write this whole piece with quotes from songs (“That’s Just My Baby Daddy” comes to mind) I am struck with disgust about where the Catholic church, and lately Miami’s Archdiocese in particular, finds itself in matters of church discipline. Between the former Father Cutie and his recent marriage (props to him, at least he left and got married like a normal…
Read More
…vative, in popular parlance) stance on religion. He associates mostly with South Asian immigrants, even going to Pakistan for a while, which, I believe, explains his ability to render the immigrant experience so well. He has a crisis of faith that happens as he learns about Shi’ism: I had been taught to revere that first generation. The Prophet had said that they would be the greatest Muslims of all time, seconded by the generation immediately aft…
Read More
…en who will promote them over their progressive sisters can just as easily promote others over them. It is the power dynamic, not just the people, that is at issue here. Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns, perhaps more than many other Catholics, took the mandates of V…
Read More
…e in Dogma, and Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. On TV’s The Simpsons and South Park, God is satirically mocked as an old giant with robes and gray hair and a strange looking, insect-eating rodent, respectively. The smash sensation video game, God of War, is now in its third incarnation, showing once again how human glorification of violence often goes hand-in-hand with religious imagery and symbolism. Sometimes the most intense physical experien…
Read More
…students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on a tour of the South. We arranged a meeting with Moore, who is an engaging man with a good sense of humor. I found myself liking him, even though I consider his ideas and his antics dangerous. In the course of the conversation—a peroration, really—Moore did his schtick about our Christian nation and how the First Amendment protects the “free exercise” of only Christians and Jews because,…
Read More
…e old Norse gods is not about theology or even ethics, but about style and promoting their subculture. In a similar sense, there are neo-Confederates and white nationalists who believe that “Christian-ness” is one aspect of their Western civilization—along with respect for tradition, authority, and whites-only citizenship rights. For this wing of the movement, best exemplified in my book by a now-deceased Washington Times columnist Sam Francis, op…
Read More