Religion Dispatches
…bee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, “McCain and Thompson kneecapped him [in South Carolina], claimed he wasn’t a fiscal conservative.” Then, Lewis maintained, when the candidates moved on to Florida, “Fox News reported that Huckabee wasn’t campaigning there.” Sean Hannity, she continued, “said it on his radio show and wouldn’t correct it” and it was an “outright lie.” “You could’ve made a case for election tampering,” she added. I haven’t, naturall…
Read More…u) with health and peace.” I think in the United States, we take ours from South Asia and just say ‘Id Mubarak, “blessed ‘Id,” with the response, ‘Id Karim, “noble or generous ‘Id.” And everywhere there is food. So much food you can see why such a rigorous fast does not produce the world’s thinnest people: they’d eat it all back during the three-day celebration. And that’s what is should be: three days of celebration. The part that puts the ‘holy’…
Read MoreI was deeply heartened to learn this weekend that in South Dakota women of the Yankton Sioux/Ihanktonw Oyate nation have revived the traditional Isnati coming-of-age ceremony for girls: four days after the onset of a girl’s first menses when adult women of the community nourish, bathe, teach, and rename girls and guide them in rituals of self-reliance like gathering their own medicines, making their own ceremonial foods, and erecting their own lo…
Read MoreThe day after I ended my ihram, I headed to Makkah with a South Asian family: a woman nearly my age, her two brothers, and her nephew. She and I had shared a mat at Muzdhalifah. Also, the time I led the salah for a jama’at in our Mina tent she had come to tell me how much she liked that salah jamaat. NO transportation was provided by our tour group for these possible trips to Mina Makkah for people to perform the tawaf ifadah. That is tawaf plus…
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…t sense of the word – meaning the whole thing is a travesty. Living in the South I regularly encounter “non-violent” gun-toting Christians who believe Jesus would have packed heat if he could have, forgetting that Jesus truly abhorred violence, even when the disciples were defending him against arrest. In the rest of the video, some good points are actually made as viewers are encouraged to “do unto the least of these” as a gift to Jesus Christ th…
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…wanted Osama bin Laden; in that there is cause for profound spiritual reflection. There is also, I hope, cause to end any confusion of what he and his followers did with what Muslims want and what Islam teaches. I pray we find in his anonymous burial, in the sea south of Pakistan, that at the end, none of the peoples he claimed to be fighting on behalf of wanted him; more than that, to the few grumbling voices out there, President Obama’s framing—…
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…“not trying to protect the framers of the Constitution.” James Clyburn (D-South Carolina), responded that “it could have been very educational if all the members talked about the United States Constitution as a living document, talked about how this country wrestled with things like race and gender.” A Refuge for the Powerful It could be even more educational if a central tenet of American historical writing about the Constitution—that it was mad…
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…map, a staple of humanitarians that shows the true vastness of the global south. The burden on these men feels just as vast. Mercifully, though, their way of life doesn’t allow for a whole lot of time for agonizing. As Trappist monks—the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, officially—they gather in the church several times a day to chant prayers, from before dawn until after dusk. In between, they’re busy with “spiritual reading” and o…
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…who supports marriage equality and abortion rights be elected in the rural South? And then there are the new district maps that were released just last week. According to Aaron Blake at The Fix, Shuler now represents the most conservative district in the state. His district (which voted 52 percent for McCain/Palin in 2008) has, with a few redrawn lines on a map, been converted to one that voted 58 percent for the Republican ticket. Blake notes,…
Read More…calling it Huntsman’s “Utah problem.” Jake Garn asks, “If he can’t generate support from those with whom he worked most closely, why should folks in New Hampshire and South Carolina offer theirs?” Don’t worry—Al Gore lost Tennessee too, and look how well it turned out for him……
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