Religion Dispatches
…deological collective. I don’t mean any picky-oon kind of ideology. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad, there was a shift from tribal affiliations or extended family or asabiyah, to one which focused instead on the shared ideology of witness. The witness is the first pillar of Islam: I bear witness that there is only one God and Muhammad is His prophet. That witness only and the principled ideology of tawhid. I don’t know how long it took before…
Read More…this problem because sooner or later they are being released on bail. “The best way to deal with this problem is to KILL them! “It is pathetic to see our media houses parading these dogs on TV and newspapers hiding behind human rights — human rights my foot! The devil has no rights!” Catholic Church: Interview with Fired Gay Priest LGBT News Italia published an interview with Krzysztof Charamsa, the Polish priest who was forced out of his Vatican…
Read More
…h a rabid culture warrior like Mike Pence in the #2 role. But probably the best evidence for somebody like this would be the ICE raids in Mississippi last week. Here’s Trump the authoritarian carrying out his promise to keep them safe—and the result is a terrorized, deflated community. People notice that kind of thing, especially when their church is called on to assist the victims. And it may never work! All the evidence indicates that there’s a…
Read More…n the world, cannot resort to debating which interpretation of the text is best, as though the texts exist independent of the people who read them. So Islam can be violent, and so can Christianity. Thankfully other Muslims and Christians want to say that those folks are not “really Muslim,” or “really Christian.” But if all we have is that which scholars call “insider discourse,” then conversations across religious divides become, at worst, dising…
Read More
…stomers and employees were free to use the restroom and changing room that best matched their gender identity, Staver responded by pledging to carry her Glock .45 pistol into the women’s bathrooms. Her gun, she quipped on Twitter, “identifies as my bodyguard.” Less than two months later, someone detonated a homemade bomb inside a Chicago-area Target bathroom. But even after Staver herself admitted on Fox News that the “bathroom predator” myth is a…
Read More
…oncern. Finally, as a constructive practice of hope, the encyclical argues time and time again for earth as a kind of “commons”—the encyclical itself is subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home.” The letter urges disparate communities—geographical, intellectual, and religious—to dialogue together for the sake of planetary action. The common home theme incorporates all of creaturely life—animal, plant, human, elemental. And such a perspective urges i…
Read More…eaven and hell. And I won’t, except to say that the Qur’an says a lot. Sometimes it seems like over-much, to me, but then I think of its primary audience ate the time of revelation: a desert Arab people. People did not give credence to anything beyond this world. So the emphasis, the language, and the imagery are appropriate to that audience. For example, one of the descriptions of heaven is with “rivers flowing underneath.” I lived in two desert…
Read More
…-psychologist for the TED Talk set. And his new book, Focus, is a New York Times bestseller. But before any of that fame, Goleman was a hardcore Buddhist meditator—and remains one today. His early books were about the development of the contemplative path, and throughout his work has run the theme of how meditative practice, in secular or spiritual contexts, can lead to greater happiness and peace—and conversely, how the disconnects in our own min…
Read More
…them mightily, and anti-abortion fervor remains high. But when is the last time you saw white evangelicals raising legitimate questions about our hypersexualized mass culture? Perhaps more telling, when is the last time white evangelicals spoke out forcefully against the cancer of a casino-based economy—or against state-sponsored gambling in the form of ever-growing state-run lotteries? In Mississippi following Katrina, the good church folk could…
Read More
…sraelis will be forced into circumstances in which it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be humane; it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be good. I have used that argument and it is true—up to a point. The problem, however, is not merely that the brutality and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians is an inevitable consequence of occupation; the problem is that it is just plain wrong. I believe American Jews who support Israel should s…
Read More