Religion Dispatches
…With the changes across the world of various time zones, imagine: at some time, all the time, for over a thousand years, someone is turning toward this place in worship. I suspect the energy that has been amassed will be palpable. And so all who have entered it tell of being over come with emotion. In addition, for all of our lives we direct ourselves there in prayer and devotion. We even make prayer carpets that depict this building (among other…
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…. We don’t have many holidays we can agree on. Sure, Muslims, Christians and Communists can get really excited about Jesus, but that’s not going to bring our Jewish or Buddhist brethren into the big tent is it? Halloween isn’t just equal opportunity, it’s affirmative action; the one time of year when the power dynamic is inverted. When looking like a terrorist means you don’t have to spend a penny, and you can still score major candy. Speaking of…
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…ing. “We have to remember that we are Tibetan refugees,” Tsomo says. “Sometimes we don’t feel the pain. We are living here, enjoying our lives, going to college and everything, so sometimes we forget.” Jamphel Yeshi, the Tibetan who set himself on fire in Delhi, came to India in 2006 from Tawu, Tibet, where a monk and nun self-immolated last year, says Tenzin Jigdal, program director for Students for a Free Tibet—India. Refugees born in Tibet can…
Read More…the Washington Post, Duin had worked 14 years at the right-wing Washington Times, which is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, until she was dismissed in June for speaking out against her newspaper’s policies. She has been a religion writer for her entire career. Really? Just off the top of my head I can think of a few major religions that have no trouble reconciling evolution with faith, including Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, an…
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…science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One-third time for Intelligent Design, one-third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one-third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence. Henderson’s letter was published on his website, thus beginning the Pastafarian movement. Henderson’s critique of ID was undeniably clever, but also continued a long tradition of arguments against religious truth c…
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…mained a faithful member of the church until her death in 1908. Yet by the time she died, the LDS Church had abandoned the (relatively) racially inclusive policies and theologies of its earliest years. Instead, the church practiced and began to formalize the racist theologies and practices for which it would become infamous during the twentieth century. Initially, I wanted to write a book exploring why James stayed in a church that initially embra…
Read More…tside the church will bring their children to Sabbath school and a growing number of openly gay students will attend Adventist academies and colleges. Like the SCC’s black members in the 1960s, gay Adventists will be able to hold their faith community legally accountable for any discriminatory responses. And, as was the case with segregation, the church will find itself once again in a losing battle against social change unless it learns from its…
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…have always been African Americans in the Jewish community. We also have a number of artifacts from the Nation of Islam as well as other Muslim communities. So the museum reminds us there were African Muslims who were enslaved, making the Islamic experience part of the founding of America. Even though black history is dominated by the Christian voice, it is not the only voice that is present. We strive to tell the story from Islam to Judaism to Ch…
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…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…
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…n part by denouncing her as a bigot and a racist who wanted “to reduce the number of children [born] to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.” The Pro-Life Action League made a similar criticism this week against the Guttmacher Institute, claiming that the Institute’s call for publicly-funded birth control “takes aim at the poor by recommending more government spending on programs to reduce t…
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