Religion Dispatches
…and I ended up taking my shahadah, declaration of faith or witness. It was Thanksgiving day 1972. From there, I returned to my university equipped with a small “how to pray” booklet, and a lot of library books. I’m sure all that reading brought more questions than answers, but that was all I had. I was once again in the closet of stories. Four months later, I was talking to some neighborhood friends about it and one of them gave me a copy of the Q…
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…e) standing and bowing in prayer. I left the ancient city only twice in my Thanksgiving day weekend visit, once to mail T-shirts to my children at the local post office and once to see the sunrise over that golden dome. And where did I do that but from the Mount of Olives. I was reminded it is not just the building we erect, in all their splendor, in celebration of the sacred event or person (because Jesus was laid to rest on a rock not in a churc…
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…on. This year, Black Friday will fall on the second day of Hanukkah, after three crazy nights are done and gone. When the glow of the Thanksgivukkah candles has faded, Christmas carols will still be playing in every public space and lights will still bedeck our neighbors’ homes. We have queered Thanksgiving with our Festival, creating something new, subversive, beyond old identities, and it will indeed be a thrilling experience. But come December…
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…ion by joining other denominations or leaving Christianity altogether. The number of priests and nuns was at an all-time low even before the recent sexual scandals, and the number of self-identified Catholics world-wide keeps declining. Many of those who remain in the Church ignore standard doctrines and believe what they want. How many Catholics disobey Church rules? About as many as the angels dancing on a pinhead. Believers know that Jesus prom…
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…or sell for under two dollars). And unlike the internet, the space of the iPhone feels not just private, but personal. Yes, the iPhone might be my means of connection with the world—it is, after all, a phone—but it is also my own little password-locked garden that I carry with me wherever I go. Moreover, I can remake the landscape with a few flicks of my fingers whenever I choose. As a result, the territory necessarily mixes the sacred and the pro…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
Read More…Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Sen. Obama is still operative.’ He has not replied. Donohue’s statement continued: It would appear, then, that the group no longer exists. It is not hard to understand why. After being criticized by the Catholic League, Archbishop Joseph Naumann…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
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…r pledge cards and enlist volunteers to canvass potential voters and staff phone banks. He said that the positive responses to his phone pitch for Prop 47 were an unexpected surprise. “It’s been amazing to see how many people were supporting this,” Hakim said. “There are more people that think about justice than I realized!” The momentum for collaborative Muslim faith-based activism around Prop 47 began to build earlier this year, when Jawaid and…
Read More…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…
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