Religion Dispatches
…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…
Read More…icipated in a panel at an Amnesty International USA national conference in Chicago. Other panelists included All Out co-foounder Andre Banks and Chicago transgender educator Trian Alexander. According to a report in the Windy City Times, Byarugabe said, “I don’t feel safe in my own country. Our leaders have sanctioned homophobia and intolerance of the LGBT community. [Our] leaders are calling for prosecution rather than protection.” More from the…
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…gushing waterfall, some of which seemed to be making its way through to my phone. I received a swarm of text messages and emails from different people I know across the country, arriving almost simultaneously: This is the best moment in my lifetime, politically. Shout out to the ancestors who r rejoicing with us 2night! Oh yeah. President Obama! A new day is on the way! Yes GOD can! Yes we can! They didn’t want to give us 40 acres and a mule so da…
Read More…e, past president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, objecting to Chicago’s gay rights parade. On Fox News Chicago, George said, “You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.” Equally Blessed charges in a statement that George “has demeaned and demonized LGBT people in a manner unworthy of his office. In suggesting that the Catholic hierarchy ha…
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…mission to use the image and to the design department at the University of Chicago Press for creating a terrific cover with it. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? There are many excellent books by historians, philosophers, and social scientists on the representation of Jews in social thought, the backgrounds and contexts of Jewish social thinkers, and the historical sociology of Jews and their relations to gentiles…
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…to protesters doing the same, but protester Michael Joseph Garza told the Chicago Tribune that he did not believe that was the case and elaborated a bit: “I went up to her and said, ‘Ma’am, please leave, we have understood you, we have made a (path),’” Garza recalled. “She said, ‘Go? Back in my day, this is what we did,’ basically, and then she hailed Hitler.” Garza posted his own recollection of the incident on Facebook the same night: The woman…
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…m the Nation repeated itself when the magazine published by Obama’s former Chicago church gave an award named for Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Farrakhan in January 2008. Obama’s campaign subsequently issued a statement that distanced him from the NOI’s leader. “I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan,” said Obama, echoing Jackson. And so, as Obama campaigned and finally…
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…mporary reports belie that notion).* It’s all rather fascinating: from the Chicago spookhouse to the Yellowface act to the fights over, and oversights of, “authenticity.” Not least is the fact of Robinson’s flip-flopping career as a sometime spiritualist sometime anti-spiritualist. That magicians and spiritualists did battle is no surprise. Their turf-wars over the meaning, mechanics, and professional locus of “phenomena” are the stuff of familiar…
Read More…ings for 39 women guests of honor from Ishtar and Judith to Christine de Pisan and Sojourner Truth. Seeing the Dinner Party was, of course, a religious experience, just as Chicago intended it to be. I found myself most captivated by the place setting for Anne Hutchinson (1591 – 1643), the feminist Puritan who led study groups in her own home in Boston and weighed in on thorny theological questions—works versus grace—that divided leaders of church…
Read More…e attempt the day after the election when she wrote “to…those who said the Chicago Machine wasn’t in town…explain why they were writing about it this morning if it doesn’t mean anything.” But the link she provides isn’t even from Chicago, it is a reprint of an LA Times survey of local races across the country. In another example: “The left has brought in their paid help to hold their signs. They have hired bus drivers to drive people to the polls….
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