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How to Choose a Tour Company for Your Hajj

By Amina Wadud

…omplete. It all feels rather last-minute to me. But then, maybe that’s the way it goes. No, if I had my way I would call this entry: how not to choose a tour company. Really. The choice of the company I am working this out with is the result of one of those eeny-meeny-miny-mo Internet searches. It’s a business, after all, this: getting people to and from hajj. A simple Google search produces lots of choices. But then, how does one decide? Let’s st…

Lying About Our Religion, And Other Problems With Polling

By Michael Schulson

…f the problem comes when information that’s useful in a limited, qualified way gets spun into generalization and speculation in the media. At the same time, polling firms do a lot to manufacture the appearance of certainty. In particular, they choose to report statistics as single numbers (for example, Pew recently found that 24% of Jehovah’s Witnesses describe themselves as born-again) rather than as margin-of-error ranges, normalized around a me…

The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

By Patricia Miller

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

From Shofars to Hammers: The Spiritual Warriors of MAGA are ‘ReAwakening’ to Political Violence

By Mark Clatterbuck

…the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the steady drumbeat of election fraud claims, to accusations that Dr. Fauci engineered Covid-19 in a Chinese lab to help a demonic caba…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…f this theistic, personalistic, transcendent God—no, I don’t buy that. The way I always define the divine is the rising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away or, as I have already suggested, the infinite creative process. There isn’t a divine creator, but creativity is divine. Creativity is an emergent process, and creation always entails destruction. I’ve rethought this in terms of these complex information-processing because…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…owns in Zimbabwe, just as overlooked and beleaguered… Big companies have always sought cheaper labor, moving from North to South in the United States, looking for the hungriest, the most desperate, the least organized, the most exploitable. Press coverage of conditions in Apple’s factories in China has been anything but glowing. Yet when Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, says he’ll give his personal wealth to charities of his choice (many of them in Silicon…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…ia to end: The war has eviscerated domestic anti-poverty efforts; war is always “the enemy of the poor.” War punishes the poor in a second way by sending the poorest to do the fighting and dying; King is scandalized that the United States finds it possible to make poor whites and poor Blacks fight and kill Asians together but won’t allow them to be schooled together here at home. War’s organized lethal violence represents a defeat for the wider ca…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

The Best Books Media of 2008

By Jeff Sharlet

…s, drawing on Gilgamesh, Boethius, Buddha, Simone Weil, and many others, always respectfully, never conclusively. “This book is an investigation of the ways people find meaning in suffering,” he writes, “or try not to be driven mad by the possibility that it means nothing.” * * * One of my favorite books of last year was Hanna Rosin’s God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt), which I described then as “the first w…

Yes, It’s Worse To Be Gay in Russia

By Chrissy Stroop

…a heroic level of bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist scapegoating—has served to activate and embolden widespread homophobia, which seems to me to have been previously often latent (the homophobia I encountered in Vladimir 10 years ago was none too aggressive). Phenomena like “Occupy Pedophilia” have appeared on the scene. Although it’s hard to say exactly how common anti-LGBT violence is in Ru…