Religion Dispatches
…on with Muslim leaders like Abdul Ghaffar Khan—a man whose legacy as a nonviolent activist and peacemaker would serve as a powerful response to young South Asians seeking a model of a peaceful jihad for freedom and justice….
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…I recently visited this New Age Stephen Colbert at his home in Charleston, South Carolina to find out, among other things, how he balances comic and spiritual concerns that appear to be at odds with one another. Note: this interview has been edited for clarity and length. What does it mean to be Ultra Spiritual? Ultra Spiritual is the practice of looking spiritual and getting other people to notice how spiritual you look. Does this reflect a cultu…
Read More…by arson or bombing in two and a half years. One third were predominantly African American churches in the south. They were able to get civil rights convictions for racial hate crimes in 60 percent of the cases in five Southern states and Nevada. In subsequent years, the numbers fell: there were 209 church arsons in 1997 and 166 the following year, according to their annual reports. The last report was issued in 2001. Altogether there were almost…
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…isenfranchising the actual persons the 14th Amendment was designed to help—African Americans—has not been lost on historians. Three years earlier, in 1883, the Court had invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875; ten years later in Plessy v. Ferguson, it would formally validate the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine. What makes that Gilded Age dramatically different from our own, however, is that in 1886 there were powerful social movements pus…
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…sly unknown group whose name implied that it was from the Deccan region of south-central India, which has a significant Muslim population. With what to Indian eyes seemed a maddeningly misplaced skepticism, the Western media remained neutral about the origin of the men, despite offering no alternative explanation. During the event, it was a British newspaper, the Observer, that traced the surviving man to a rural part of Pakistan. In Pakistan, off…
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…shment and compiles annual statistics, reports that for the most part only Southern states resumed executions. Ohio, which carried out two, was the only state outside the South to impose the death penalty in 2008.” (See the DPIC’s “The Death Penalty in 2008: Year End Report” for more information). “2008 can only be characterized as yet another rollercoaster year for the death penalty in Texas,” said TCADP Executive Director Kristin Houle. “The sta…
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…jority of African Americans support safe and legal access to abortion. And African American women have the highest rate of abortion amongst all groups of American women. The reasons are not mysterious—Black women are disproportionately poor, under-employed, single and living in highly segregated communities with limited health care access which have borne the brunt of the economic depression. Due to slavery and the violent legacy of Jim Crow, Blac…
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…icant uptick in searches for one-way flights to airports near towns in the South of France and Turkey (both of which are rumored to be safe havens from the apocalypse), so everyone from scholars to journalists to NASA—even the Vatican—continue to quell worries and debunk myths. Well before we began to approach the actual date, the Maya apocalypse hysteria inspired Mark Van Stone, an expert in Mayan hieroglyphics, to write 2012: Science and Prophe…
Read More…ongress to do so and attempt to “block” (his word) the Supreme Court from reviewing the constitutionality of such a law. Gingrich is apparently the only one of the presidential candidates to run with George’s proposal. At a similarly styled forum in South Carolina in September, George befuddled the other candidates with his questions about his personhood idea. UPDATE: Fertilized eggs should have equal protection, but children should work as jan…
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…” said Perry, “but a salvation agenda.” Hallelujah, and onward to Iowa and South Carolina. “Only The Lord Has All The Answers” Not everyone at Saturday’s event was convinced Perry is presidential material, but what matters is that The Response has put a glow around him. Rachel Robbins, who had traveled with her family from Fort Worth, told me she didn’t know much about Perry, but that she decided to make the trip because “the government tries to d…
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