Religion Dispatches
…ster rolled around and I could at long last register in an Arabic language class. Still, it was the miracle of the text that drove me. Every word I learned, every grammatical construct, I had already come upon in the Qur’an—although by using the phonetics alone. About the only thing that slowed down this rabid pace was becoming a mother. So I had two children (including one born in Libya, where the knots in my ear and my tongue were loosened) befo…
Read More…between NAMBLA and the Catholic Church g. Unintelligent Church: A Journey Towards Creating a Tea Party Theology h. The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists i. Dawkin’s Demons: Dissecting his Dark Night of the Soul j. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War [The real titles are: b, d, e, h, j]…
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…itarism, and of course ideology confers an identity: part of what makes us Americans, according to that ideology, is our support for the armed forces, and you’re never more American than those who have fought and died for our way of life. Walter: And what this continual war does is that it continues to produce voters of these people and their families and so on who sustain a political commitment to all that stuff. It seems to me it gets increased…
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…lacking in today’s evangelical churches. He says he can’t find a seminary class exclusively devoted to teaching future leaders about love. He can’t find any megachurch conferences that have one workshop developed to teaching about how to love one another. “It’s not surprising that we’ve developed a loveless church,” Haggard says. Since June, at the Pikes Peak Center (Cheech and Chong will be performing their Getting Legal tour there Oct. 16), Hag…
Read More…n; I am this nationality; I am this religion; I am in this social economic class; I am any category of a number of things: including food consumption. Because I am this or that, then I am better than you. Sure oppression, or zulm, as it’s referred to in the Qur’an, also requires power: the power to exploit the differences as such, but even that is interesting in the way it is discussed in the Qur’an. For one thing, in the Qur’anic stories of Satan…
Read More…this morning I offered to drive my daughter and my grandson to their mommy class at 9:30 with the reasoning I would start my blog after that, and still have it done before noon. Only for that I have an appointment with myself at 10. It’s avoidance, for sure. But why? Whenever I think of surat-al-Nur, I want to say I think about the passages about divine light nur an ‘ala nur. But alas, it’s the gender and society stuff that always gets stuck in my…
Read More…in religious communities. “There are very few things that have changed in American public opinion as dramatically as support for gay and lesbian rights. Since 1994 the numbers really pop off the charts over a 20-year period. These trends occur across all religious communities. So the white evangelical fundamentalists today are far more accommodating to gays and lesbians than they were twenty years ago. So are Catholics and mainline Protestants.”…
Read More…who last year took a stand and refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in class. Will believes that until gays and lesbians receive the same rights and recognition as heterosexuals in this country, the phrase “liberty and justice for all” is just a farce and he refuses to be a part of it. Phillips was speaking at the Big Commit Sunday in Washington DC, a counter-rally to the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage’s wrap up of its “Summer for…
Read More…eant I had no family schedule. I lived in a dormitory and besides going to class and a small part time job, I was a free bird. In Ramadan a free bird, flies high on the rituals of the month. I stood for 20 units or tarawih every night that I was fasting. Like the first time reading through the Qu’ran in Arabic on my own this was exhilarating. Somewhere around 12 or 14 units, I lost track of everything outside of the recitation and the ritual perfo…
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…ng the World Trade Center. How does an imam approach this? How do I, as an American and a Muslim, deal with what people claiming my religion did to us—New Yorkers, Americans, human beings? How do I explain that I was scared because my city was attacked, but I was also scared because people might blame me? I tried to rush down to help, but by the time I got further downtown there was too much smoke to go any further. People rushing in the opposite…
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