Religion Dispatches
…t the days missed for menstruation must be made up before the next fasting year. Any temporary condition that is an exemption must be made up at some other point. This is true for women and men. It’s just that women have these periods regularly. If I were a jurist I would have made a different ruling: would not require women to make up those monthly days of exemptions. It is not arbitrary, so let me say something about my reasoning. For starters,…
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…y of Jesus’ thousand-year reign, perversely echoed by the Nazis’ “Thousand-Year Reich.” “Apocalyptic” refers to “a sense of imminence about the great upheaval and the scenario whereby we now go from this evil and corrupt world to the redeemed one.” Every millennial group, whether religious or secular, is marked by the transformation of “normal time” to “apocalyptic time”—when its followers eagerly anticipate the millennium, seeing signs and symbol…
Read More…during the zealous days of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. Last year 90 organizations joined the call for reversing the memo, renewing calls that had begun shortly after Obama took office in 2009, and that have proved to be an exercise in futility. But the issue has taken on greater urgency since the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, interpreting RFRA to protect the right of corporations to refuse to cover contrac…
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…e, refuses. “The beast we eat is human,” he says—specifically healthy five year-old boys who have been willingly sacrificed by their parents. This is a pointed request: Ciruttontar and his wife, Venkattammai, have only one child, a healthy five year-old son. They kill him, and their servant makes curries from the boy’s flesh. Ciruttontar serves this meal to the god, who invites him to sit down and eat—and then demands that Ciruttontar call his son…
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…observed along with folks who have been layering the ceremony with meaning year after year. It is possible to study the celebration of Passover as a Christian spiritual group if it is done with respect and knowledge. My own church hosts a Mediterranean potluck with hummus, pitas, falafel, and we read the Passover story from the Bible, look at haggadot of all types and discuss the elements—but do not actually go through the ritual of the seder. We…
Read More…on Moghul wrote here just after Oklahoma voters passed a shari’ah ban last year: Shari’ah is, for Muslims, the “path to the water,” the texts that normatively define a moral life and the means to God and heaven in the life to come. But Shari’ah is an ideal. Muslims, across countries and centuries, have only ever been able to interpret revelation, producing readings of Shari’ah which are never fully conclusive, because Islam recognizes no central a…
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…on. The Hmong people, an ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, have a 5,000-year-old religious tradition which is shamanistic and animistic. In Hmong cosmology, the spiritual world and the material world are linked in complex ways, and the shaman works on behalf of the community to restore health, harmony, and to keep good relations with the ancestors (for an excellent documentary on a Hmong shaman from Appleton named Paja Thao see The Split Horn.)…
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…pportive and 50% are opposed, figures relatively unchanged in the last few years but that are up in comparison with data from 2016. The pattern noted above also holds here. 72% of white evangelicals oppose equal bathroom access for trans individuals, compared to 28% of nonreligious Americans, a figure that has essentially held steady since 2016. In a year that has been marked by some truly draconian anti-trans initiatives, such as Arkansas’s law b…
Read More…to return to my little house alone. I do love Indonesia. This was my first year since my children started to fast nearly three decades ago to be fasting alone in my house, while not living alone. I find it difficult. So when I came to the east coast, I got to enjoy fasting, suhur, prayer and iftar with the people I love the most on the planet: my own family. I remember posting on Twitter just how awesome it was to have that combination: my own eat…
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…slam in the Modern World in the Netherlands. They generously gave me a two-year fellowship. So in 2004, I left my teaching position at Swarthmore College, which I dearly loved, and moved to the Netherlands to pursue two years of research and writing. I was determined to produce a full book that would include a study of hadith and also Islamic law and ethics. Homosexuality in Islam was published only in 2010, but it was written during that two-year…
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