Religion Dispatches
…up. Better now than to risk being caught up in the mad rush closer to fajr prayer. No extra prayers today, but a lot to think about. At the top on my list is reflecting on this cultural hajj before proceeding to Arafat. I would have preferred a hajj surrounded by religious zealots, or Sufis, but Allah chose this hajj of cultural Muslims, so I will do best to surrender to it and find both strength and humility therein. Next I will outline our Arafa…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
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…aring the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that…
Read More…uality and Mormons for Marriage Equality. Both groups marched in Seattle’s Pride Parade last Sunday, and had representatives at the coalition’s first “people of faith” phone bank on Tuesday. Religious volunteers, they believe, can sway values voters by sharing personal stories about their own faith journeys toward supporting marriage equality, gay relatives and friends, explained Andy Grow, Washington United for Marriage press secretary. “In Calif…
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…ny step.” The group’s contribution to the larger interfaith effort to pass Prop 47 represented an important shift toward greater civic engagement in immigrant Muslim communities, several of which have the highest growth rates of all immigrant groups in Southern California. The state’s diverse and growing array of Muslims are thus an integral part of the collaborative movement that has put California at the leading edge of criminal justice reform n…
Read More…nformed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.” According to Merritt, that was the last time he corresponded with Gallagher. Merritt continued emailing Gallagher throughout April trying to get a contract. At this poi…
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…m sixteen different categories (joy, thankfulness, etc.), and display an appropriate Bible verse; while iChing Divination delivers a technological version of that ancient Chinese practice. There are also a variety of apps to aid in meditation practices: iMantra, for instance, divides its mantras into five categories: Buddhist, Hindu, Kundalini, Universal, and Planetary. Users can slide mala beads from one side of the screen to the other and even r…
Read More…to abortion and same-sex marriage their top political issues.” In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won a small majority of Catholic voters over George W. Bush. Four years later, while the Gallup poll, exit polls and the American National Election Studies project disagreed on which way the Catholic vote had gone, it was clear Bush had closed the gap. The turnaround was in part due to a Republican Party proje…
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…rvatives to “justify” human rights violations like slavery and Jim Crow. Appropriating the language of abolitionism is also in line with white conservatives’ proclivity for claiming the mantle of the Civil Rights Movement in bad faith efforts to undermine both racial justice and women’s rights. In the video, Scott explains at length to those in attendance about how to contact their state legislators in support of her bill. The video also reveals t…
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…What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only humans had the right tool or p…
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