Religion Dispatches
…ts, they may to some extent resist facing how poorly Russia still performs internationally in a number of important respects—not least LGBT rights. That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that the US is far from perfect, and I am ready to criticize many of its policies. I suppose that it is precisely this readiness, this desire many of us have to show that we are open-minded and fair, that represents one key psychological source of the tempta…
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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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…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…
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…his political base in Uganda among evangelical churches, while blaming the international community’s condemnation of the law for cuts to incoming foreign aid. Through this act, Museveni has declared war, and sanctioned the systematic persecution of sexual minorities. It is hell to live in Uganda as a gay person, and one wonders how life will be for LGBTQ persons after this bill becomes law.” Ugandan officials have reacted defiantly to internationa…
Read More…ficial launch of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce’s latest international affiliate in the Dominican Republic. The petition says the U.S. Agency for International Development is “also supporting LGBT activities with their current budget.” “Though we have proved to be a tolerant country, we deem this agenda disrespectful to the culture and traditions of most Dominican families,” it reads. As we have previously noted, Cardinal Nicolás…
Read More…distribution network across sub-Saharan Africa. It is, in other words, an international crossroads. That phrase is dangerously misleading when applied to Kazangula. One thinks of Istanbul, for example, as the international crossroads of the East and West, of the Christian and Muslim worlds, and can immediately conjure up images of exotic shops, cultures, cuisines, and communities; exotic would not be a term regularly applied to Kazangula. The dis…
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…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…
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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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…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…
Read More…sday, to every registered Republican or non-aligned Iowa voter with a cell phone on record. . . . The video’s star is Molotov Mitchell, whom Cary K. Gordon, president of PeaceMakers Institute and pastor of Sioux City’s Cornerstone Church, calls “the guerilla warrior of Judeo-Christian political commentary.” Mitchell is an edgy independent filmmaker whose Illuminati Pictures delivers something akin to an animated political cartoon weekly at WorldN…
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