Religion Dispatches
…more to us than just our faith, and not every stereotype that torments us today can simply be corrected by a celebration of the perfection of our sacred texts. The CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) representative or the Saudi mufti who denounce ISIS are doing important work, but it is naïve to believe that positive images of Islam alone can drown out the paranoia of Islamophobia, that the solution to all our problems lies only in the d…
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…ted to his personal charisma, marketing skills, or both—was extraordinary. Today the International Sathya Sai Organization disseminates Sai Baba’s teachings and manages a network of over 1,200 Sathya Sai Baba centers in 126 countries. Most of his devotees came to acknowledge him as god-man without ever meeting him in person. Sai Baba’s devotees include powerful politicians (including former prime ministers of India), celebrities, and entrepreneur…
Read More…uestioned the HHS witnesses. Smith charged the Obama administration with “promoting abortion” through the contracting process and of engaging in “unethical” violations of religious conscience laws, although his proffer fell short of establishing any sort of legal infraction. “The Obama Administration’s bias against Catholics is an affront to religious freedom and a threat to all people of faith,” Smith said. The USCCB was discriminated against, S…
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…sade at college campuses around the United States and Canada, distributing free altered copies of Origin of Species. Because Origin is in the public domain, Comfort was legally able to add to the book his own new 50-page introduction, in which he quotes from Mein Kampf in order to link Darwin to Adolf Hitler, accuses Darwin of being sexist, and argues falsely that there are no transitional fossils in the fossil record. Next month marks the four-ye…
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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…at least partly inspired by fiction, the fact that it exists in real life today becomes even more remarkable. Kaitlin Foley has noted that social networking sites such as MySpace have played a significant role in galvanizing both virtual and bricks-and-mortar support for the Taqwacore bands, as they do for most bands today. How do you all think the fictional and virtual origins of Taqwacore have affected the development of the Taqwacore scene so…
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…gical schema? Robertson would say that Haiti’s centuries-long struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and dignity is indeed a demonic project—but it would have been hard for captive Africans in Saint-Domingue to embrace the divine character of their colonizers’ Christian God. What the colonial ruling class understood to be either divine or demonic in the Christian pantheon, the enslaved African laborers had to have understood as one and the same evil f…
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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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