Religion Dispatches
…remains valuable to thinking about gender and sexuality—and religion. The book was largely inspired by—and shaped around—my idiosyncratic obsessions and my intuition that there was some relationship between them and that they all spoke to each other, to dominant cultural fantasies about masculinity, and to Christianity. I had this sense that there was something to be gained by paying close attention to representations of the male-body-in-pain—acro…
Read More…the rest of the way to shower and change before heading to the Mosque. My roommate was in the room. She had returned the previous night with a Bangladeshi family whose daughter was not feeling well. According to her school of Islamic law, it is not mandatory to stay more than one night in Mina. See, how useful it is to be better informed about the options? We went to the second floor of the mosque to make tawaf and then sa’iy. We chose it 1) becau…
Read More…aying, “Some problems are beyond our power to solve, and according to the Book of Joel, Chapter 2, this historic hour demands a historic response.” (I’ve written here about the meaning of a Joel 2 “solemn assembly.”) Robison had been pushing for a governor to take up his prayer call, arguing that “we need our governors, our state leaders, our national leaders, really come together in real serious prayer because we need answers from above.” And eve…
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…ver the summer in an effort to stop the legalization of gay marriage, and no one showed up? Ask the folks at the National Organization for Marriage—because they know. So far, the group’s “One Man, One Woman” Summer for Marriage Tour 2010 has drawn tens of people at each stop, including one in Indianapolis today. Courage Campaign staffers who attended today’s rally reported: “I have hand-counted 29 non-NOM staffers attending the rally—about the sam…
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Sitting in Jacob Needleman’s living room in the Oakland hills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m usin…
Read More…uence: Oklahoma state representative Dr. Doug Cox. As you may know, Personhood USA has lately set its sights on Oklahoma in the group’s ongoing effort to find some state willing to pass legislation defining fertilized embryos as legal, rights-bearing persons. (Disclosure: I live in Oklahoma and have been involved, in a volunteer capacity, in some of the efforts to defeat this legislation.) Personhood USA appears to have learned one lesson from its…
Read MoreIn Hollywood, apocalypticism sells. Audiences delight in seeing our world destroyed, and recent films have sought to cash in on that oblique eschatological hope. Southland Tales and The Omen tripped over their own quotations of Revelation, but other stories drew more subtly from apocalyptic tradition. Children of Men and V for Vendetta were cryptically anarchistic depictions of Babylon’s destruction. By comparison, this year’s I Am Legend was an…
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…game has more potential to offend than Cards Against Humanity, A Game for Good Christians just might be it. Inspired by the R-rated “party game for horrible people” in which players pair cards like “Hospice care,” “An endless stream of diarrhea,” or “A defective condom” with fill-in-the-blank statements like “I got 99 problems but ________ ain’t one,” A Game for Good Christians, released earlier this year, offers a scriptural twist: most of the ma…
Read More…rdination in 1978]; as a teenager for me that was incredibly painful, but looking back it was an amazing experience in that I felt the pain, I saw my parents feeling the pain, but working within the Church for change, and then I saw change before my eyes in all the things that we were praying for. It gave me a sense of optimism that has carried me throughout my whole life. For many years, I felt like there was no other option for gay Mormon people…
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…, the assassinated provocateur/filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and the Danish cartoonists who satirized the Prophet Muhammad in September 2005. But the two authors also share one overriding similarity: focus on rage/outrage as the key term for describing this moment in Muslim-Western relations. Why does the doublet—rage/outrage—appear as the dominant image to reflect Muslim responses to what seems to be provocation at best and blasphemy at worst, from an…
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