Religion Dispatches
…atable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kio…
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…m, the question of the day was similar to ones being asked today: Can this flight from the churches be stopped? Chubb feared that these wayfarers on the frontier would “become individualists and isolationists so far as religion is concerned, each ‘going it alone.’” Chubb’s words, so similar to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone,” resonate clearly today, and they offer a warning to those who bemoan what such high numbers of “nones” means for the future…
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…cancer, and even an opera singer he meets and befriends on a transatlantic flight. Much of the book is centered on the small loving universe that is peopled by Schaeffer’s immediate family members—his two young grandchildren in particular, whose startlingly perceptive utterances put me in mind of that venerable line in the Bible (Jesus, but quoting Psalm 8): “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise.” The writing style i…
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…y is that it is not limited to religiopolitical violence. Lankford cites a number of American suicide terrorists that exhibited “classic suicidal traits.” Like Joseph Stack, a divorced software engineer with tax problems. In 2010, Stack crashed his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; “There isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken [with me],” Stack wrote in the…
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…hows how far American Muslims have come, and how much our communities have changed. We’ve invested in people, re-engaged our religious tradition, built bridges with the world, fought back in horror at the ugliness perpetrated in our name and discovered in the process what we think faith asks of us. That philosophy—if it is not too much to call it that—asks that we leave no room in ourselves for the kind of certainties which confuse the Absolute fo…
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…xception. As is his custom, the Pope gave an interview to the press on the flight from Cuba to America. Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service reported that, in response to questions about being a communist and Newsweek‘s “Is the Pope Catholic?” headline, he responded: “I am certain I have never said anything more than what is in the social doctrine of the church. I follow the church and in this, I do not think I am wrong.” That is key to understan…
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…reating all the chaos. As I boarded my plane for Panama, with a connecting flight departing from, of all places, Houston’s Bush International Airport, visions of interesting frogs and secluded beaches began to recede in my mind as I became fixated on what seemed to be a disturbingly justified question about the citizens of the United States: Are we, um, stupid? When I arrived in Panama, I made my way over to Bocas del Toro, an insanely beautiful a…
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…aft accusations did not involve carnal relations with the Devil, nocturnal flight, or being able to fall down stairs without sustaining injury. Though they imputed magical evildoing, the accusations mostly involved more mundane human problems, like suspicion, resentment, and festering doubt. This characteristic aligns with what anthropologists and historians who work on comparative witchcraft have made clear: that while witch fears can take quite…
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…oft-quoted statement about gay priests—“Who am I to judge?”—occurred on a flight back to Italy from Brazil. Most recently in Tblisi, Georgia, the pope referred to the “theory of gender” as a “great enemy to marriage today.” He added that “there is a global war to destroy marriage,” and that the weapons being used are a form of “idealogical colonization.” In the past, Francis has used that phrase to describe Western ideas being forced onto develop…
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…ut already has a thick goatee. When I tell him I’m a Jew he takes out his iPhone and wants to play me a song. Hebrew lettering appears on the bottom of the screen and a yarmulke-clad singer stands on a stage, microphone in hand. When he begins singing, in Arabic, Ahmed knows every word. He sings about chewing qat, about falling in love. “Most of the Jews here went to Israel, but they stayed Yemeni—listen to his accent! He’s a perfect Sana’ani. He…
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