Religion Dispatches
…sections of religion and popular culture, I also looked forward to Perry’s new film because I wanted to see how his theological message of hope and faith would sustain his new efforts to address a global concern: the financial crisis. But the centralizing of the white family—which is a departure from Perry’s traditional filmic presentation—not only distanced Perry from his usual target audience of African Americans, it placed large servings of par…
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…abella of Spain forbade Columbus and his crew from enslaving people in the New World, unless those people were cannibals. If they were cannibals, the Queen announced, Columbus could take them, put them in chains, and sell them wherever he pleased, inside or outside Isabella’s many realms. Reports of cannibalism in the New World spiked. In general, cannibalism is widely reported but difficult to confirm. Subjects will often tell ethnographers about…
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…trates how a different context for a work of art creates new meaning for a new audience. Today, the civil rights battle over marriage equality becomes the new backdrop for a protest musical peppered with religious imagery at every turn—lesbian and gay folks are left hoping that we may finally be experiencing the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Hair, Circa 1968 The original production of Hair was a departure for the Broadway stage because of its ra…
Read More…s no more complexity, there is no more discussion. We have become shallow, Republicans, Catholics and Jews.” As Rabbis Raymond A. Zwerin and Richard J. Shapiro write in a piece for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, according to Jewish law, “a fetus is not considered a full human being and has no juridical personality of its own.” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America [now T’ruah: The Rabbinic…
Read More…guing that a council of religious jurists was more qualified to select the new shaykh al-Azhar than the president. He is also a member of the NDP’s policy committee, which is headed by Gamal Mubarak, one of the president’s sons. Al-Tayyib claims that his comment about the “Shi‘i trap” noted above is akin to the Iranian government’s approach toward Sunnis in Iran. He said that he would continue to welcome Shi‘i students at al-Azhar in order to “i…
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…bad taste, has already dubbed the arrest of several prominent Brooklyn and New Jersey rabbis last week the case of the “kosher nostra”. It is an ugly story, and not just how the Post tells it: alleged corruption among ultra-Orthodox leadership in the form of money laundering through charities and, even worse, strong-armed trafficking in human organs. Not two years after the breaking of the Agriprocessors scandal, we have another searing example of…
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…n extraordinary modern achievement. And it’s uniquely universal: people in New Guinea set their watches by the same standard as people in New Mexico. Ideological enemies find common ground; the United States and North Korea might not agree on much, but we both set our clocks by Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Systems this total have a strange knack for becoming invisible. Here’s the anthropologist David Graeber, talking about the capitalist market, but…
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…f whom are Latino/a), he continued Cardinal Mahoney’s fight, but with some new weapons added to the arsenal. So what’s new about the tactics we see being developed by Archbishop Gomez this summer, and how do they relate to the future of Catholicism in America? Too Much Wine Flowing in Napa? A good place to seek answers would be the July 28, 2011 “Catholics in the Next America” conference at the Napa Institute, where the archbishop’s new weapons…
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…contributors below and make up your own mind. — eds For all pieces on the New Zealand terrorist attack, click here. Below are the pieces that directly address the “White Christian Nationalism” question: March 18: Behind New Zealand Terror Attack Is a Problem Bigger Than Islamophobia (Murali Balaji) March 21: White Christian Nationalism May Not Be Religious, But It Is Christian (Murali Balaji) March 29: The White Nationalist Fantasy of Ancient Chr…
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…al College vote, a process already being obstructed by Cruz and some other Republican lawmakers. And, given that these pro-Trump terrorists carried not only American, Confederate, and Trump flags, but also explicitly Christian symbols along with signs and flags bearing anti-choice, QAnon, and right-wing Christian slogans like “The Children Cry Out for Justice” and the not-so-apolitical after all “Jesus 2020,” the release of American Atheists’ new…
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