Religion Dispatches
…this morning I offered to drive my daughter and my grandson to their mommy class at 9:30 with the reasoning I would start my blog after that, and still have it done before noon. Only for that I have an appointment with myself at 10. It’s avoidance, for sure. But why? Whenever I think of surat-al-Nur, I want to say I think about the passages about divine light nur an ‘ala nur. But alas, it’s the gender and society stuff that always gets stuck in my…
Read More…n; I am this nationality; I am this religion; I am in this social economic class; I am any category of a number of things: including food consumption. Because I am this or that, then I am better than you. Sure oppression, or zulm, as it’s referred to in the Qur’an, also requires power: the power to exploit the differences as such, but even that is interesting in the way it is discussed in the Qur’an. For one thing, in the Qur’anic stories of Satan…
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…stions. It’s easy to carry on those quarrels. I gave an address to the Episcopal House of Bishops two years ago. The Bishops were concerned that the Episcopal Church is dividing into red and blue, and so you have red and blue parishes and red and blue priests and red and blue dioceses and all that. So the question the conflict was about is, how do red and blue Christians live together? I do think that the gospel has got to contain the ideological…
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…l source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not Marx. So far, Beck has said nothing about black experience and nearly everything he has claimed about the bible has been untrue. His objection to the idea of collective salvation is no…
Read More…ster rolled around and I could at long last register in an Arabic language class. Still, it was the miracle of the text that drove me. Every word I learned, every grammatical construct, I had already come upon in the Qur’an—although by using the phonetics alone. About the only thing that slowed down this rabid pace was becoming a mother. So I had two children (including one born in Libya, where the knots in my ear and my tongue were loosened) befo…
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…ossible (pun intended) to destroy books as a way of entirely eradicating a class of information, as Diocletian and many other emperors wanted to do. This is impossible to do because books are no longer physical objects but also electronic ones. It is also impossible to do because even electronic destruction may not be effective. At best, no matter how widespread a computer virus (a contemporary version of book burning), there is no guarantee that…
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…here. In addition, in every Muslim context, minority or majority, in every class from the very poor or basic to the very wealthy and affluent, Muslim women are active in the promotion of their own well being as well as the well being of others. Everywhere. Certainly the scope of their activities or the impact will vary according to many factors, but we need to put the rest the notion that we are waiting to be saved. Especially when the idea of bei…
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…t closed for high holidays but then there’d only be a half dozen of us per class. When I left home at 14, I lived with families of different faiths: Jewish, Unitarian Universalist, Catholic, and atheist. Questions of ultimate concern always interested me, and as soon as I got to college I actively pursued the answers given to these from faith systems outside my own. Eventually I came to live in a Buddhist ashram and practiced according to the prec…
Read More…lished in my studies (well more than established: a die-hard. I aced every class and with one exception, one B+, I kept that record until I graduated). By that time I began to notice that certain issues repeat themselves in the Muslim community. Somehow, I thought if I had figured something out for myself then everybody should have figure it out too, and we would be over that. It occurs to me that experience may not be the only teacher. I mean, I…
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…me? Why am I peeking into these windowless bedrooms at middle-aged, middle-class blondes in fuzzy slippers and sweats? Why am I spending an hour of my life watching a middle-aged advertising salesman in suburban Utah standing there in the predawn hours in his sweats explaining where he keeps his clothes? And perhaps because I’m tuned in on assignment as a religion columnist I’m disappointed by the near absence of religion in the episode. Early in…
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