Religion Dispatches
…y, beginning with small-group conversations over boxed lunches in the open air. Although the shift gave some participants a slight case of the bends, the result was fascinating. A good many cynical and despairing people who had all but given up on Golden State politics started talking like competent change agents and started asking about where and how they can get trained to do the work. Could it be that Crossan’s “collaborative eschatology” conce…
Read More…e two rites have been completed, I am done with umrah. I can then clip my hair one finger’s length (the guys are recommended to shave their heads) and then go back to my regular clothes. Now thinking about these eight days before the hajj time, of course I will visit these rites again, but this is one type-A personality which is happy to have time when I do not have to be on task. This way I can observe some of those gender constraints I am worrie…
Read More…people are treated and what their rights are under a new policy,” Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Bentley B. Rayburn, the executive director for the Presbyterian and Reformed Joint Commission on Chaplains and Military Personnel said. “We’re concerned not only that Christian chaplains (be able to) preach the truth from the pulpit, but beyond that that they are not forced into supporting things that would be contrary to their moral understanding of the…
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…-Americans, riding in cars and on cheaply-made floats, trying to create an air of excitement. But there was something sad, hollow, and strangely touching about it—as if they were trying too hard to whip up enthusiasm and regain a proud sense of identity. Security, Pride, Tranquility Many looked like they had just stepped out of the pages of a 1950s-era issue of Life magazine. I got a strong impression of people longing for the secure identity that…
Read More…hot potato you can’t touch… that disparity and that imbalance, it’s so unfair.” She further complained that “it’s like there’s a media blackout and a lot of tea party people watch Fox.” Both Lewis and Ahlersmeyer consider themselves tea partiers and attend tea party events, but were disgruntled that, as Ahlersmeyer put it, “I think people have been told Palin is the tea party. Why is that? I don’t know.” “She’s exciting,” said Lewis. “She’s a wom…
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…ouple days before the Pinker piece. I felt obliged by a medieval sense of fairness and honor to repost it in my status bar. Just about then, a student from a course I’m teaching online about online teaching emailed me with a question about a compline prayer that had been tweeted by Virtual Abbey the night before. That took me into the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer, with a brief sojourn into the tragedy that is Lindsay Lohan, who, frankly, coul…
Read More…direction, and one row going in the other direction. Today it is in a nice air-conditioned enclosure, with a row for those in wheelchairs in between the other two. I am really working on not being in that row. Then we get to drink some of the nice mineral water; still flowing, imagine that? I’m really working on being fit enough to make the run-walk, sa’iy, while at the same time contemplating the fate of this African slave woman and her child aft…
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…ut the incredible outpouring of love and faith and urgency that I felt in Nairoibi. What role does the patterned fabric play in the series? Why did you choose to use it? I collect textiles and have been using them in work for a while. In the past, I’ve torn upholstery off sofas and wallpaper off walls and incorporated it in my work. What I particularly loved about the khangas—these really bright, beautiful bolts of cloth that women wear as skirts—…
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…new spirit of religious pluralism and earnest spiritual seeking was in the air, well before such ideas became popular—first mainstreamed, then trivialized—in the later sixties. Sweeney’s curatorial work was aimed at preventing the crasser kinds of marketing and the trivialization of the New Age. The historical dimension of this story is important; in some ways the Fifties and Sixties seem impossibly far away, compared to the way religion and spiri…
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…nd positively refreshing, so much that I feel like putting my hands in the air and giving him a hearty “Amen.” I know. Weird. But in Haggard’s church Sunday, there is no discussion of Obama being a covert Muslim, of socialist-led plots to force death panels on Grandma, or of decrying the concept of social justice. (Actually, each week, Haggard devotes 30 percent of the offering to a cause named by a member of the congregation.) So, it makes me rea…
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