Religion Dispatches
…first was about a Vatican prelate, Monsignor Ricca, and an alleged gay affair a decade ago and the second about the Vatican’s ‘gay lobby.’ So, while the pope wasn’t offering any new teaching about gay people in general in this particular setting, he was most certainly departing from his predecessor on the matter of gay priests. Pope Benedict XVI, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and later as pope did see being h…
Read More…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…
Read More…g, parasailing, and now faux flying in a wind tunnel. It’s true I love the air; I love rides in the amusement park that let me soar through the air. I’ll ride those bumpy exhilarating roller coasters, but my heart belongs to that elevated rotating swing that lets me whirl and whirl in the air, arms outstretched. Why this made me think about encounters with the Sacred, I imagine you can only guess. Some people do speak of moments that shake their v…
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…ime. We were like fish that crawled onto land and, over eons, evolved into air-breathing, live-bearing, warm-blooded beings without knowing how that happened. During millions more years, some returned to the sea, where legs morphed into flippers instead of fins. They became dolphins, whales, and manatees. But they remained warm-blooded and still breathed air. Their tails lay horizontally and moved up and down, the way legs had propelled their ance…
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…ts of the Muslim diaspora through cheap communications technology and easy air travel. Islamist military tactics (Web sites as command centers, commercial airplanes as weapons) developed not simply from Hollywood movies, as was so often claimed following the 2001 attacks, but from the experience that constitutes the Muslim sacred community. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is therefore at least partly right in insisting that spiritual and not merely materia…
Read More…ears. I first tried to go on hajj from Egypt (in 1981-2) because the total airfare was like 250 US dollars. I had my air ticket before I applied for a visa locally. In the end, the quota prevented me from going, despite the “reasons” given. We don’t have a quota in the United States. So when I first went online to get general information (earlier this year while still in Indonesia listening to my friends’ incredulity), none of the US companies eve…
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…nto this long conversation about reincarnation and I presented him with my reservations about such a thing. Something is left, namely the body, and as that disintegrates small creatures make use of the bits and pieces and in that sense it’s reincarnated, but there isn’t anything else, some nonphysical thing that has feelings and thoughts and memories and personality that goes into the little critters or into a person. What gets transferred from pa…
Read More…ssia’s appeal was roundly rejected by 80 votes to 43, with 37 abstentions. China, Belarus and Muslim countries like Malaysia supported Moscow. Indonesia abstained but voiced “strong objections” to Ban’s decision. European nations, the United States, Australia and Mexico were among those who rejected Russia’s motion. For Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Ban was within his rights to make the administrative decision, which has…
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…ness in and for a denomination that has lost its way.” Regardless of those reservations, 10A is now the law of Presbyterian land. What lessons can be drawn from this success? Learning from Failure Amendment 10A is the culmination of years of tweaking and learning from past failures. After a 1997 attempt to replace “fidelity” and “chastity” with language about living with “integrity,” advocates spent a few years pursuing a strategy of deleting t…
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…wrecked havoc on the tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal. Joining me aboard the flight from Singapore were a few other journalists from the United States and Europe, a team from the China Lingshan International Rescue in their distinctive fire engine red uniforms, and several dozen surgeons from South Africa who had come to Nepal with Gift of the Giver organization, an NGO founded in 1992 by a Sufi sheik from Istanbul. Among us were Christians, Hindus,…
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