Religion Dispatches
…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…
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…he cancer that had crawled across his body, had lain in bed at home with a phone against his ear while my pastor, who had called him from the pulpit, pointed a cordless phone toward the congregation; we all wept and sang him love songs as he lay dying. These are uniquely evangelical experiences that shaped me, that will always be a part of me. I still long for this kind of community—the kind that journeys together through all the peaks and valleys…
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…gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone. I received a swarm of text messages and emails from different people I know across the country, arriving almost simultaneously: This is the best moment in my lifetime, politically. Shout out to the ancestors who r rejoicing with us 2night! Oh yeah. President Obama! A new day is on the way! Yes GOD can! Yes we can! They didn’t want to give us 40 acres and a mule so da…
Read More…icipated in a panel at an Amnesty International USA national conference in Chicago. Other panelists included All Out co-foounder Andre Banks and Chicago transgender educator Trian Alexander. According to a report in the Windy City Times, Byarugabe said, “I don’t feel safe in my own country. Our leaders have sanctioned homophobia and intolerance of the LGBT community. [Our] leaders are calling for prosecution rather than protection.” More from the…
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…their less happy circumstances. In Western societies like Britain and the United States, the affluence of the powerful few, uninterested with religion as they happily are, shapes the norms of religious participation for the society as a whole. The effect is to minimize the role of religion as a social balm. That is, the United Kingdom, among the ten least religious nations in Diener’s study, is pretty much all out of opiates. Those who have don’t…
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…mporary reports belie that notion).* It’s all rather fascinating: from the Chicago spookhouse to the Yellowface act to the fights over, and oversights of, “authenticity.” Not least is the fact of Robinson’s flip-flopping career as a sometime spiritualist sometime anti-spiritualist. That magicians and spiritualists did battle is no surprise. Their turf-wars over the meaning, mechanics, and professional locus of “phenomena” are the stuff of familiar…
Read More…rences for several years. Hosting visiting protesters was a coup for TST’s Chicago chapter, which only gained official status in February. April: TST announced their intent to sue the state of Arkansas. The legislature, in an effort led by Sen. Stanley Rapert, installed a Ten Commandments monument on their capitol in 2015. After TST began meeting with the capitol arts and grounds committee to discuss a location for their statue of Baphomet, the le…
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…h profiled Armet Kolesov, a 23-year-old gay Russian violinist who lives in Chicago. This spring, a day after his birthday, Kolesov recorded a 15-minute message to young gay people in Russia, and it went viral. A few excerpts: He went on, in Russian, to tell the story of growing up as the fourth of six brothers in a small town, an hour’s drive from Moscow, where his father was a deacon and his mother was a youth pastor at the Pentecostal church. “I…
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…was omitted. The shooter or shooters there have not been apprehended, but Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel offered a warning that, as I will discuss shortly, hardly helps matters for those of us who are concerned about what seems to be a growing tide of mass violence. “Take your stuff to the alley,” Emanuel was quoted as saying. “Don’t touch the children of the city of Chicago. Don’t get near them.” Our digital-age attention spans generally being what…
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…to protesters doing the same, but protester Michael Joseph Garza told the Chicago Tribune that he did not believe that was the case and elaborated a bit: “I went up to her and said, ‘Ma’am, please leave, we have understood you, we have made a (path),’” Garza recalled. “She said, ‘Go? Back in my day, this is what we did,’ basically, and then she hailed Hitler.” Garza posted his own recollection of the incident on Facebook the same night: The woman…
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