Religion Dispatches
…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
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…his fellow travelers very unhappy. H.B. London, the dour head of pastoral ministries at Focus on the Family, denounced the prayer services in the press, in a widely-circulated email, and on his blog. London reportedly told the Religious News Service of Haggard’s plans to hold prayer services, “When you think of the ethics of that, it, to me, just defies explanation.” Not to be left out of the media feeding frenzy, other high-profile pastors in th…
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…us moments at a revival, goes slack sometimes, and this book has its limp, cheap moments, cellophane grass and gassy puns that might only elicit an “organ yawn” from readers. It may not be the best poetry collection in English published this year—that may, in fact, like rivers of milk and honey or peace and goodwill between all humans on earth, simply not be a thing—but Giving Godhead is a worthwhile example of art using the so-called sacrilegious…
Read More…yrics of the “Punk Prayer.” That resulted, some weeks later, in a panicked phone call from an administrator asking if I had taught Pussy Riot lyrics. The incident blew over, but the ban on LGBT “propaganda” was passed at around the same time. And I would be lying if I said I haven’t become at least somewhat more careful with what I say in the classroom since. Self-censorship is, I think, the way most LGBT Russians and their allies deal with the le…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…it days or weeks to communicate by exchange of letter or telegram. The telephone promised a pathway out of our isolation and loneliness. In 1926, Arthur Pound sung its praises: “We who are still young have beheld millions of farm families emerge from isolation, the tucked away mountain hamlet and prairie village brought into touch with the busy currents of trade and social intercourse. Many new tools and systems originated by science and organized…
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…ds, and bridges. It is too early to know how many people have died but the number will probably be in the thousands. The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in Uttarakhand right now. Many of the forces that frame daily life in South Asia are suddenly on display like a raw wound: the wages of development and globalization, the power of the natural world, divi…
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….com poll participants called it “uncanny and sublime” and “filled with cosmic beauty.” “Five different numbers, with different origins, built on very different mental conceptions, invented to address very different issues. And yet all come together in one glorious, intricate equation, each playing with perfect pitch to blend and bind together to form a single whole that is far greater than any of the parts. A perfect mathematical composition,” wr…
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…to 2009, 680 people have been murdered due to gender and sexual non-conformism. According to Amir Ashour, the remarkable founder of IraQueer—a charity to support LGBTQI+ citizens in Iraq—queer people are publically exposed by Isis with their names and photos on walls around Baghdad. “In some parts of the country, if it is even discovered that you know a queer person, it can be very dangerous.” Amir explained that on one of these “killing lists ….
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…that the mandate would force a “small group of religious objectors into submission.” But what if that’s not the case? What if it’s not a “small group” seeking exceptions, as suggested by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s new analysis of employer health benefits plans? Kaiser found in fact that 10 percent of nonprofits with more than 1,000 employees have requested an accommodation to the contraceptive mandate, as did five percent of firms with between…
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