Religion Dispatches
…ighted to learn that Kunta Kinte (played by LeVar Burton) was a Muslim. I knew about African American athletes who had converted to Islam: Muhammad Ali, who came to Sunni Islam via the Nation of Islam, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who came straight into Sunni Islam. And in 1978, I came to admire the character of Venus Flytrap (played by Tim Reid) on WKRP in Cincinnati. On one episode in the final season (1982), a detective who was about to arrest Venu…
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…such special interest groups as AIPAC. This speech may have cost him large numbers of these smaller, progressive donors without gaining him much from the small numbers of larger, more conservative donors. Indeed, there may not be a single policy issue where Obama’s liberal base differs from the candidate more than on Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Green Party and its likely nominee, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along wit…
Read More…bivalent during that state’s recent personhood battle. This could mean any number of things, of course: from the simple and unsurprising non-news that sometimes people with the same job disagree with each other; to the possibility that personhood legislation is an unsettled question for US Catholic bishops; to the question of whether the bishops’ national fight with the Obama administration over contraception coverage has hardened their other posi…
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…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…
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…being supported and disseminated by powerful media representatives on Fox News and One American News Network (OANN), along with a not insignificant number of elected members of Congress. A great deal of the concern on the part of white people is over their potential loss of status in America. This concern is being expressed in current Trumpist Republican efforts to curb access to voting by people of color and the social panic being fomented about…
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…been seen “worshiping the sun and stars, and purifying [themselves] at the new moon, bathing in the river, and invoking the heavens.” Today, scholars such as Harvard’s Kimberley C. Patton provide theologically informed readings of many traditional claims about the religious awareness of other beings. Patton deals, for example, with “ways in which animals are believed to possess a unique awareness of holiness,” noting that “in many religious worlds…
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…ion Research Institute (PRI), claimed that the proposed law represented “a new front in the abortion wars”—one that they hope could associate the pro-life movement with anti-racism and attract a different demographic of supporters. The argument wasn’t new, conceded PRI head Steve Mosher. Anti-abortion intellectuals have long proposed that linking female infanticide and sex-selective abortion with all abortion might persuade reluctant supporters of…
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…was all undercover and I was just naïve. As a younger pastor, I was in a renewalist community and the gay people I knew there all regarded their same-sex attraction as a temptation they were trying to resist. I was just taking their story on its face and had no experience understanding about it; I inherited the traditional consensus on the question and never really examined it. It was probably in the early 2000s, when our church started in the col…
Read More…th, for both are part of my devotion to Allah). They do have a substantial number of women included, so I would not complain on that count. But, here’s the thing: there are no women under the category of Muslim intellectuals. Apparently women don’t think. So it is even harder to adjust to the loss of these three men whose intellectual contributions helped to shape the ways we think about and in fact live Islam today; both for women and for men. I…
Read More…ple attend Friday prayer services every week, most of them Indian. But the number of Panamanian converts is rapidly growing. Bhattay said about two or three new converts come to Jama Mosque every week. Six months ago, the mosque began offering classes in Spanish — instead of just in Urdu — to accommodate the growing demand. There is no discrimination in the Muslim community in Panama City, Bhattay said. “Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, there…
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