Religion Dispatches
…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…
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…cy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats faced by women, LGBTQ people and people of color are a…
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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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…“Patriots” or “Christian Patriots.” They may be Identity Christians, Neo-Nazis, or adhere to racist forms of Paganism; they may even be secular but still expect to participate in a revolution that will destroy the federal government and create a collective salvation for white Americans. People who call themselves “Sovereign Citizens” or “Freemen” believe they have deciphered the secrets of the American Constitution and “Common Law,” so they can b…
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…are more multifaceted than ever. At times, some humans seem driven by a refusal to inquire about the nonhuman lives within and near their communities. This refusal is evident in food practices, where many encounter animals most frequently. At the same time, more households in the United States today have companion animals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine percen…
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…nual March for Life, Alveda King led a group of demonstrators in laying thousands of roses on the White House lawn to symbolize African-American abortions as part of her “Birmingham Letter Project.” The BLP Web site features a dyptic photograph of a hip, white pro-life man wearing red “Life” duct tape over his mouth next to three black civil rights marchers being hosed into the side of a building by segregationist police. (The injection of righteo…
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…sion of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of LGBT people. There are a number of evangelicals that are very open to this and are having the same experience I had of actually knowing gay and lesbian people, so I think it’s inevitable. I think there will be a sector of evangelicalism that will go past mainline protestant denominations, which have more institutional restraints. The more autonomous congregations will outpace them in acceptance. Th…
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…n its religious composition, but a 2009 international report estimated the number of Muslims at around 24,000, comprising less than one percent of the country’s population. Most are of Lebanese, Palestinian or Indian descent. Though small, Panama’s Muslim community has grown increasingly ethnically diverse. The first Muslims to come to Panama were African slaves brought over by Spaniards in the mid-sixteenth century to work in the mines. Throughou…
Read More…take it twice! So there!)—“might insist that correlation does not imply causation.” My statistically muddled insistence be damned, however, because Downey doubles down by arguing that “correlation does provide evidence in favor of causation, especially when we can eliminate alternative explanations.” Like pipers, for instance. What is missed, however, in the churning of this internet-killed-religion yarn is, first of all, that changes in complex…
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