Religion Dispatches
…ting consciousness turned “in part on a suggestive paradox: How can modernist aesthetics be reconnected with a complex mystical tradition from which it has never been separated?” (italics mine). In other words, how may the modern museum escape the fiction of its own secularity and thereby rediscover its spiritual roots, its spiritual task? It is telling that Sweeney’s bold vision was not entirely successful. He resigned from the Guggenheim when Ha…
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…particularly in the Holocaust, was historic in its proportions. While we must strive for a future of peace that rejects violence, it is also important not to forget the past, lest we fail to learn from it. Having learned from it, we can then find the path to peace and rejection of violence through forgiveness. Gandhi’s Jewish Interlocutors, 1921-38 Of course much of the incivility of the current Gandhi flap can be understood in terms of the polari…
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…ition of antisemitism,” David Engel, Maurice Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at NYU, traces the way that it originated in the mid-19th century as a label for a very local and limited position among a group of anti-emancipation Germans who held that the rights granted Jews were threatening to the vitality of the German Republic. It was not, Engel argues, a term describing the secularized extension of medieval Christian anti-Judaism. Nor wa…
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…associated with the approaching millennium at the end of the 1990s. Former St. Louis rapper Chingy, who achieved stardom with the hit song “Right Thurr,” later abandoned mainstream hip hop, adopted the Hebrew Israelite faith and recorded the track “King Judah” dedicating his music career to spreading the Hebrew Israelite message. In a social and political climate that has produced the “Black Lives Matter” movement, to witness a rapper of Kendrick…
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…ies in the rich array of mathematical and psychological analysis that is most striking and most misleading about it. We don’t need a President or Treasury Secretary to hold our hand; we don’t need to be reassured, and we don’t need help getting in touch with our anger. Rather, what the seemingly endless rolling tide of concussive scandals—all the lies, the subterfuge, the duplicity, and the grabbing of one’s own undue share before the rest of popu…
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…er to do, and they share only that one joke-book. But what explains the constant number-calling around homosexuality in so many American churches? Why do we rehearse arguments most anyone active in church has already heard dozens of time? Why do we behave like prisoners? I don’t think that long-term veterans of church debates have much hope that undecided people will be persuaded by the repetition. Most of us know that persuasion happens in other,…
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…ms, and logging projects. Particularly since Uttarakhand became a separate state (first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the buil…
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…oung adulthood. Pigpen’s “rider” has departed for an unknown place. He’s lost her number and can’t find it. “Directory don’t have it, central done forgot it.” And he’s desperate to reach her, if for nothing more to make sure she’s “doing it right.” It’s clear in the song that Pigpen’s search for a viable number is, at best, a futile proposition. Still he dials the telephone operator to try find that lost landline. Problem is, he’s not even sure wh…
Read More…to lay out the arguments for same-sex marriage. Although there was at least one student in my class who was under 18, no students or parents complained about my pedagogical methods in Vladimir. But if I were to do the same thing today, I could be arrested, detained for up to 15 days, deported, and fined 100 thousand rubles (a little more than $3000) to boot. Four Dutch nationals have already been arrested and deported for violating Russia’s ban…
Read More…However opponents are saying that if the bill is passed it will be the first step towards same-sex couples adopting and marrying in Latvia – though there is nothing about adoption in the proposal. Recognition of same-sex couples was among the recommendations of the European Humanist Federation to the Latvian Council Presidency. Ireland: Lesbian senator campaigns for marriage equality Ireland’s only out lesbian senator, Katherine Zappone, made a v…
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