Religion Dispatches
…now called the “Zone Assessment Unit.” See, they’re not targeting you because you’re Muslim or Lebanese. They’re targeting you because you’re in the NYC Hezbollah zone. Or something. How can this possibly be constitutional?…
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…like a movie.” At first, that Tuesday morning, the billions outside the NYC area simply watched. And watched and watched and watched… the planes striking the trade towers. With a society full of camcorders, the images are endless. But while on the first day (the 11th) we saw planes striking buildings, people running through the streets, and people jumping out of buildings, the more extreme images were gradually left out. There was a lot of comp…
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…ntisemitism that arose in the aftermath of the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville NYC school strike. That conflict, which led to a citywide strike, pitted a Jewish leader of the United Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, against Black parents of school children and community leaders such as Rhody McCoy and black panther Stokely Carmichael. The JDL’s initial mandate was to provide civil patrols, in what were then called “frontier neighborhoods,” to pr…
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…members of the Union Theological Seminary community for the Millions March NYC. My sign became a hashtag and sparked a larger conversation. I think #JamesConeWasRight is about much more than just one person, it’s about voices that have long been sidelined; this includes Womanist theologians (many of whom were students of Cone who rightly critiqued him on sexism), Latin American theologians, and Queer theologians for example. There’s a whole host o…
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…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…
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…slipped into the dorms we couldn’t get signed into, and posted hundreds of cheap notices printed on 8.5 x 11 paper. We’d invited a prominent imam to speak and ordered a delicious dinner, convinced that the perpetually elastic undergraduate stomach would be the gateway to the soul. The next morning, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were struck, thousands were murdered, New York City went into lockdown, and our community was sent reeling. Eve…
Read More…th hate from politicians and religious leaders seeking political power and cheap popularity.” She and more than 130 volunteers then distributed the magazine across the country and into some unlikely hands, including to Uganda’s Parliament, president, and other politicians, as well as churches and media outlets. Nabagesera says Bombastic has been a “big hit,” allowing her to attract correspondents in every country across the African continent. She…
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…armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dichotomy is spread wide, with ISIS on one end and the antinomian carnival of de Sade’s vacation home at the other. That’s a freedom worth fighting for, she implies, but it i…
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…wars; both have nuclear weapons aimed at the other. Speaking by satellite phone, one of the attackers explained that he loved India, but that Muslims could not stand by while their mothers and sisters were killed. This indicates that revenge was one of the motives for the attacks. One of the consequences of this cycle of violence is that Mumbai is now a highly segregated city, so much so that Hindus now refer to traveling to a Muslim area as “goi…
Read More…bravery. The law that passed in June—which is, I think, best explained as cheap populist scapegoating—has served to activate and embolden widespread homophobia, which seems to me to have been previously often latent (the homophobia I encountered in Vladimir 10 years ago was none too aggressive). Phenomena like “Occupy Pedophilia” have appeared on the scene. Although it’s hard to say exactly how common anti-LGBT violence is in Russia, it should be…
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