Religion Dispatches
…weeks or months, but for decades, to satisfy this God into not burning me alive? I might live Islamically, but just for a few days, and thereafter I’d give in to temptations my Islam had no room for, my religious education gave me no means to comprehend, and my sense of the divine gave me no slack to grapple with. Islam left me crumpled in otherworldly exhaustion, the spiritual effort to be Muslim wearying me like no physical exertion ever could….
Read More…wished I’d written someone else’s book. For me, writing is a way of being alive — when I lived as a man, it was my only way to feel alive. I am grateful to have written the books I’ve written, and can’t imagine writing anyone else’s. What’s your next book? I’m working on a new collection of poetry, tentatively (very tentatively — I’m a terrible titler) entitled Otherness. Two more poetry collections, Impersonation and Fireworks in the Graveyard, a…
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…tting it to use for good. I also really like to travel, have fun, and meet new people.” Kruger says it was “blind faith” that got him on a plane to Kathmandu less than 24 hours after one of the other guys suggested he should make the trip. “My faith drives me to love everyone,” Kruger said, “and to show that love through my actions, with the understanding that I am no better for my faith or experience/knowledge. That is the ideal, not always easil…
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…ger cultural vocabulary. Nancy Ammerman’s study of what she termed “Golden Rule Christians”—practicing believers across Christian denominations and ideological spectrums who take the scriptural teaching that one should “do unto others as you would have them do to you” (Mt. 7:12) as the core Christian value—certainly tracks a similarly generalized Christian ethic. But I would suggest that the ethical perspective of those I might tag as “Good Samari…
Read More…sts endorse spanking. What makes the Twelve Tribes different is that, as a new religious movement in which members live communally and share child-rearing responsibilities, they’re unfamiliar to most of us. As such, the movement has faced repeated attempts by government agencies in the United States and abroad to take children from their custody. In 1984, Vermont state troopers and child welfare officials removed 112 children from the group’s Isla…
Read More…to return to God. Without agency, without the imperative for each of us to live our lives deciding for ourselves our own courses of action as best we understand, there would be no need for an atonement. This central tenet is one of the things that makes Mormonism a very American religion—it makes self-determination one of if not the driving force of Mormonism. That said, I think it’s important to understand agency and atonement in conjunction with…
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…ity, and outrage at reports of acts of unimaginable selfishness and the intrusion of politics into relief efforts. On the one hand, evacuees cross a river on a bridge whose floor consists entirely of Indian soldiers. Residents of affected areas provide shelter and food for those who have survived. On the other hand, there are stories of shocking venality, ranging from post-flood looting in Kedarnath to tales of price-gouging. People are criticizin…
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…s Arendt’s response to Gershom Scholem’s accusation that her Eichmann in Jerusalem lacked Ahavat Yisrael (love of Jews). (Arendt did consider herself a Zionist, but that was a time when non-statist Zionism was still possible.) Butler attempts to construct a new secular Jewish narrative that is non-Zionist and not founded on classical Jewish texts or Zionist theory. It is thus born from an engagement with these marginal Jews; Arendt, Benjamin, Levi…
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…r diverse outcomes. This makes sense if you stop to think about it: if the world you live in is pluralistic, you accommodate different possible answers to the same questions. But if you live in a culture with more agreement on what God’s will is and how it should be applied, you’re more likely to see that as universal. (Again, this is very broad, and it’s possible to make too much of the distinctions.) When liberals think about morality, then, the…
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…thin the 1948 borders of Israel—basically, excluding the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip—who hold Israeli citizenship, and vote, even if ‘their’ Prime Minister has demonstrated that a good way to win elections in Israel’s ethnic democracy is by race-baiting and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, horrified pundits pretend no such thing has happened before. Though, let’s be fair: Israeli Palestinians who can vote nevertheless live as second-cla…
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