Religion Dispatches
…embassy and secure an affidavit stating I have been practicing Islam since 1972. When I brought that to the embassy they said: you need to have a mahram, the male guardian. At the time I was divorced and my son, Muhammad was only six years old, living with his dad while I was away. My father was deceased and all the other living males in my family were not Muslim. There was no office I could do to secure what was demanded of me, so the day for my…
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…ed by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children, and the injury of 468 Palestinians, of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follows: 57 percent, or 310, were caused by Israeli aircraft missile fire; 28 percent, or 150, where from Israeli live ammunition; 11 percent, or 59, were…
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…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…
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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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…nly gay former US ambassador to the country. The New York Times profiled a number of everyday people, Muslims and Christians, who are taking part in legal challenges to the Trump administration overs its executive orders banning entry into the U.S. from a number of countries. Paul Harrison, an American man engaged to an Iranian man is among the individuals profiled: Like the other plaintiffs, the couple veer between dread and hope with each succes…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
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…(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 building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…
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…umference, putting pi at 3. A Babylonian clay tablet from somewhere between 1900 and 1600 BCE sets the constant at 3.1250. An Egyptian papyrus from 1650 BCE goes with 3.1605. In 250 BCE, the Greek mathematician Archimedes discovered a geometrical approach to calculating pi, proving that pi is somewhere between 3.1408 and 3.1429. Today, supercomputers can calculate over 13.3 trillion digits of pi. It’s not just mathematicians who seem to be entranc…
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…now for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset did so. Nobody identified as Confucian. Just six families, worldwide, said they were “other.” By elimination, that leaves around 200 Chinese kids for the non-religious side of the ledger, or around 60% of the total non-religious pool. So, how do we know that this study is picking up on something unique to religiosity, instead of t…
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…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…
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