Religion Dispatches
…ligious observance at the 2008 scholarship awards: We take the opportunity today to offer our congratulations to the many students of Saddleback College who have worked so hard and achieved so much. Historically at events such as these we also take the opportunity to offer a moment of thanksgiving to God — if He exists. And I’m not here to say that He does. That would be wrong for an elected official, I am told. No matter that America’s founders i…
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…urately, lie and obfuscate, all to propose the end times can be mapped out today, which is cool, because you’ve already got all these ridiculous maps. So why not, I don’t know, invade a country preemptively? One cannot insist on innocuous analysis when one’s last chapter is ‘yes, Islam is evil, but Muslims are not.’ While Muslims might be too stupid to know Islam is evil—sound familiar?—we can rescue them from their ignorance—sound familiar? Thi…
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…ation. As a Muslim, I’m exhausted. You may think that what plagues Muslims today is a rowdy minority of gung-ho militants in the desert of Iraq and Syria. I think our problem is more subtle than that. We have convinced ourselves, and others, that we live on a planet apart as perfect Muslims who speak exclusively as agents and caretakers of their faith. The spectrum of our visibility is narrow: we are either the fanatic bad Muslim or the sanitized…
Read More…arah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Today’s hearing was a political show-trial bought and paid for by the powerful lobbyists at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops exerting their influence over certain members of Congress. . . . [F]ederal tax dollars should not be used to impose religious values on others.” Issa, who claimed to be conducting the hearing over the $2 million contract because of the necessit…
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…of oversimplified bullet points: An unpleasant aftertaste: As noted above, today’s labor movement is tremendously diverse, both ethnically and racially. Women and people of color run some of the biggest unions. But many religious leaders of a certain age are more likely to recall the older exclusionary craft unionism. They remember cranky George Meany and his ever-present cigar. They remember the building trades—Meany’s crowd—raining both bricks a…
Read More…rying to put the best face on their prejudice. For example, UK’s Christian Today editors are trying to convince people that it’s not bigotry to reserve the word “marriage” for heterosexual couples and call all those “gay marriages” civil partnerships. But being different doesn’t have to mean bad or discriminatory. Relationships can be held in equal regard by the state and society, but accommodated by both differently – a single mother may receive…
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…ng the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community. Singularity is the sin that resonates with me—forcing people to choose one thing over another in terms of our identities. Hybridity, like an apple-pear blend, gets to the notion that we can…
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…gies, philosophies, languages, medical therapies, diets, rites of passage, codes of conduct, aesthetic norms, artistic conventions, and technologies furnish entire communities with a shared sense of identity and the ritual/theological grammars required to guide their common life and transmission of humanity from one generation to the next. If God’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou b…
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…k the capital of Portugal on November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day. Scientists today speculate that it probably registered as a nine on the Richter scale. It devastated the population. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 10,000 to 100,000. At the time the quake struck, worshipers filled the churches honoring their dead. The churches, the worshippers, and the city around them were effectively destroyed. Not long after the major quake hi…
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…ic legacy, voices such as these cannot be found among the Mormon hierarchy today. After the 2008 crash, the Mormon Conference focused on economic issues, but narrowly, stressing individual thrift and endurance rather than taking on socioeconomic structures or public policy. I had assumed that the silence on the part of today’s Mormon leadership was due to ignorance. It had gotten out of touch. Mormon Leaks has disabused me of that assumption. Elde…
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