Religion Dispatches
…hose values that are the pillars of our republic and the guarantors of our freedom. They erode our national well being. Those who commit these crimes do so fully intending to tear at the too-often frayed threads of diversity that bind us together and make us strong. They seek to divide and conquer. They seek to tear us apart from within, pitting American against American, fomenting violence and civil discord. Even while the religious right was lob…
Read More
…the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christianity political power base in the Western United States. In less than a decade, Haggard built one of the most influential megachurches in the nation. Not Everybody Loves a Comeback Story…
Read More
…ance, has acquired a whole new symbolic register thanks to its role in the African American freedom struggle of the last century, particularly as the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory. Who knows what work it might perform in the future. And who can tell what the World War II Memorial might mean to Americans decades from now. If we are lucky, its unapologetic braggadocio will look like a historical aberration; if we are less so, it will appe…
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 More
…d with rhetorical flourishes. To further his education, his abbot sent him south to Christian Barcelona, which then had diplomatic ties with the Islamic caliphate of al-Andalus. In the caliph’s library in Cordoba were at least 40,000 books (some said as many 400,000); Gerbert’s French monastery owned less than 400. Many of the caliph’s books came from Baghdad, known for its House of Wisdom, where for 200 years works of mathematics, astronomy, phys…
Read More
…—but that will in no way reduce the sadness I will always feel when I look south on the anniversary of 9/11 and see the Tribute in Light where the World Trade Center once stood. As General Powell rightly said, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim in this country. Being Muslim does not make me any less American. Haroon Moghul_________ How Far is it to Islam? We spent the first Monday evening of my senior year plastering every dorm we could…
Read More
…es to Hank Williams. Our friends are second-generation American Muslims of South Asian, Arab, and African heritage, white converts, and beautiful toddlers of interracial marriages. Watching them interact, I am content, and hopeful for our future here. My husband and I push the stroller through the neighborhood after our friends leave. The festival is officially over but children are still dancing on a wooden floor as the crew dismantles the stage…
Read More…ded on many Muslims for its economic success. On the one hand, many of the African slaves that worked to produce the raw materials of early American industry were Muslims. On the other hand, during the trade of goods between India and New England, some of America’s trading partners were South Asian Muslims. These two economic factors helped keep the young country afloat in the first decades of the nineteenth century. (Check Kambiz GhaneaBassiri’s…
Read More…high school clubs. Next up: atheists. The Secular Student Alliance, which promotes atheism and humanism with chapters at more than 200 colleges, is sending in reinforcements for teen free-thinkers—a push to launch 50 new high school clubs. Godless teens want the same social benefits that evangelical teens find at the annual “See you at the pole” flagpole prayer events at thousands of schools every September, and the court-sanctioned afterschool B…
Read More
…can Catholicism, ever produced. Father Matthew was neither famous nor self-promoting, which is what makes the lyrical strains of the notes he did produce so very eloquent and so very worth our hearing. Both men seem to me now the product of a different age and a different time, and more to the point, both men were the result of a different way of inhabiting time—a monastic, a poetic, and ultimately a rather silent way. Both men came of age in post…
Read More