Religion Dispatches
…any journey reminds me of this journey, so the dream was more like a cross between some idea related to the hajj and something I thought about on this trip. I made a last-minute effort to at least buy presents for my grandsons, who already have a quite a collection of T-shirts from various places, if not from the airports on the way out of those places. It’s one of those “thought that counts” kind of things: a way of sharing something from my time…
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…k men occurs right after a weeknight bible study among football players at East Mississippi Community College. EMCC is where players go to get their academic, athletic, and personal lives back on track after getting kicked out of powerhouse programs like Florida State and Auburn. Some are there because they used drugs. One was charged with burglary. Another punched a woman in a bar. Football players spout self-serving platitudes all the time. “No…
Read More…National Geographic has a cool article on Darwin’s DNA, which traces his genetic ancestry to his paternal ancestors from their migration out of northeast Africa to the Middle East or North Africa around 45,000 years ago….
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…t of us in the U.S. don’t understand the complexities of the relationships between religious groups in Africa, and some of us tend to draw a very stark picture of Muslims against Christians. Can you help us better understand the religious dynamics of peace and war in Kadugli and more broadly in Sudan? The issue is complex and has more to do with Arabization: some Arabs imposing their own culture on black people, refusing, denying other black cultu…
Read More…lead researcher, Dr. Peter Francia, to conclude, “It is not a culture war between red states and blue states, but rather a war between Fundamentalists and biblical minimalists within both the red and the blue states.” The moderates, apparently, shift their alliances but tend to cluster in blue states. The research further suggests that division doesn’t come from elites in politics and the media who “may be responding to the polarization that exis…
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…-day politics, but what Reza Aslan described as “a cosmic war,” a struggle between pure good and outright evil, in which there can be no compromise, Russia’s involvement is a problem. Given Russia’s antagonistic relationship with several Muslim-majority regions, it may not be preposterous to believe Moscow’s Syrian intervention may strengthen ISIS rather than defeat it, and therefore also weaken Russia rather than strengthen it. It may also be the…
Read More…oon on the 8th day of Zul-Hijjah, when we will all go about 5-6 kilometers east of Makkah, to a place called Mina. There we stay performing the five daily prayers starting with the mid-day or zhuhr prayer, but these will be shortened. Usually for travel prayers are shortened to two raka’at instead of 4, and zhuhr and ‘asr (mid-day and afternoon) prayers are combined. Here, they will be shortened but not combined. We stay in Mina, in a kind of mode…
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…ink that he simply came too early. His enemies insist that the distinction between money and credit cannot be entirely erased; Law, they suggest, did not understand that the renter and the worker possess very different relationships to money and to credit. Some can absorb debt better than others; some can wait out a crisis longer than others; some can postpone payment of debts, while others cannot. In short, Law’s System was not nearly as universa…
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…a with the goal of bringing together close to 200 young people from across East Africa to talk about the post-election violence that broke out after the 2007 Kenyan elections. Button found inspiration and challenge when she stepped off the plane in Kenya, and she came back to create a series on her experience there. JS: How did your faith or the faith of other people play a role in this series? MB: During The Peace Summit, interfaith dialog was a…
Read More…nbuttoned critique and protest. What the great Louis Brandeis called the “freedom to be left alone,” though nowhere spelled out in those words, still comprises the very core of the First Amendment, as our president—the constitutional law scholar—surely knows. That freedom is now clearly gone. The president mewls in defense, “but we are leaving you alone: we’re not even actually listening.” That answer is nowhere near good enough, as (again) he su…
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