Religion Dispatches
…ah. Give or take two hours for complication, I thought this meant that bus number two would be leaving around 2 a.m. He arbitrarily divided the group by floors: floors 6 and below would go at midnight and the rest of us would go sometime later, on the second bus. Because this is what I came for, the hajj that is, I was way off in the “on pins and needles” camp. I lay in bed sometime around ten, after the bath and packing a backpack and deciding wh…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
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…nd indoctrinated into right-wing extremism. Abbott says she often receives phone calls from Idaho Republicans asking her what to do about the party’s extremism problem. Noting that the extremists “are organized, and they show up,” Abbott tells these concerned Republicans that they need to start showing up themselves if they want to reclaim their party and stop local officials from refusing to enforce state and federal directives. “You can’t just s…
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…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
Read More…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…
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…level of devotion frequently compared to religious faith. The cult of the iPhone revolves around the notion that its smooth, technocolor surface signals a web of connections between its owner and a network of users who are global, hip, and savvy. But it is also true that the iPhone works so well because each individual can customize the device. That’s why these faith-based applications have proliferated: The door is wide open to claim that space i…
Read More…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…
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…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…
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