Religion Dispatches
…try remembering to humble myself before the throne of the All mighty, the Bestower of favors, and go right on ahead and ask for what I want. That too shows love and trust. I trust that Allah will bring some repose, or grant a favor. I also have a little bit of concern over that: “be careful what you pray for.” Sometimes the consequences of one prayer’s answer are more troubles than you were facing. So, better to be prudent. I used to have a stick…
Read More…off last year after my accident.) You know what they say about saving the best for last?! So it is appropriate, I think, that in my reading I came across several discussions about the ummah, which gave me additional food for thought. The word ummah comes from the same root as the word for mother, umm, in Arabic. So, with such a root, you should get the picture already. It’s about intimate connections. But it is never used for family nor even for…
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…s Baldwin, whose thought and influence are still very much alive. Although best remembered for his novels and incisive cultural criticism, Baldwin spent several years as a teenage preacher in the historic Black wing of evangelicalism. Eventually deconverted by everything from Dostoevsky to the hypocrisy of other ministers, he would end up balancing distance from any church with affirmation of his essential belief in love, punctuating it all with c…
Read More…men’s exclusive access at designated times. I have a plan, and Allah knows best. I will do whatever the rest of the day might dictate to get as much access within the limited times as I can. I like my shaykh’s advice to seek as much of the nur or light of Muhammad (saw) as I can. My shaykh, and many Sufi teachers talk about Nur-Muhammad. Some go as far as to say the whole universe was created only after Nur-Muhammad. Or that the whole of the unive…
Read More…off last year after my accident.) You know what they say about saving the best for last?! So it is appropriate, I think, that in my reading I came across several discussions about the ummah which gave me additional food for thought. The word ummah comes from the same root as the word for mother, umm, in Arabic. So, with such a root, you should get the picture already. It’s about intimate connections. But it is never used for family nor even for e…
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…now is this: how can we wage this battle even more effectively? How can we best shield ourselves from the inevitable onslaughts of predatory journalists, readers, and politicians who prefer “fake news” over evidence-based, critical discussions on religion and society? How can we more fully reap the rewards of living dangerously? It is not about policing our tone or maintaining respectability. On the contrary, I beg public intellectuals: do not san…
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…st and white Catholics in the Northeast. You can bet that Jones—one of the best pollsters of American religion at work today—has the data to back his argument up. White Christians, as he notes, are much more likely than the average citizen to buy the “heritage not hate” shtick about Confederate monuments, and much less likely to agree that the repercussions of slavery and institutionalized racism make it difficult for Blacks to find economic succe…
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…outhat is reminded of Islam? Strange, yes. I could use stronger words. The best historical analogy Douthat can find to the factionalism rending apart an American political party is a conflict between two great Middle Eastern superpowers, divided by religion, each intent on physically eliminating the other? But it’s not a bad analogy, you see. It’s a Freudian slip of an analogy, revealing what Douthat is really thinking—and offering a surprising in…
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…and established emissary posts there). Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and u…
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…less and submissive mold of that imagined old-country shtetl of their East-European ancestors—the ‘ghetto Jew’ which, through guns, brawn and steel, these muscle-Jews boast of having willfully overcome. Their disdain for liberal co-religionists leads them to embrace core themes of White nationalist antisemitism. Like others on the dissident Right, they castigate liberal diaspora Jews for supposedly engineering mass migration, LGBTQ rights, racial…
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