Religion Dispatches
…ester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11. Mr. Roger said he hoped the pope would say prayers for the place, for the people, and for his daughter Jean. Praying at a unlighted candle next to the prie-dieu Pope Benedict XVI used on his visit, the Pope offered those prayers silently while looking at the south pool of the memorial. The 9/11 site has become not just a memorial or a museum—it is a pilg…
Read More…ort and through security, I was too tired for breakfast. I slept the whole flight from RDU to Charlotte, but once I’d landed in Charlotte, with only twenty minutes to transfer to my Milwaukee flight, I was starving. Famished. Broken. But the only breakfast option I trusted was Starbucks, and every single Starbucks had a line that resembled a breakdown of civilization at the baggage claim. So I did not do that. I stopped at a newsstand slash conve…
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…erson at the desk, who sat there, right when the doors were closed and the flight took off, just as you arrived. It doesn’t really matter who exactly provides some justice. The institution probably just prefers to funnel it through one channel, namely customer service, because then they can have stricter rules, what is given, how much is given, under what circumstances, and so on. There are larger social problems than missed flights, like racist p…
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…The travel agent said this change was required from the Saudi end; thus my flight into Jeddah from Paris had to be changed. But in order to make this two-hour adjustment, I lost my direct flight to Paris. The difference is, instead of leaving in the evening on Sunday, my departure time is 8:45 a.m. Not such a big deal ordinarily, but remember, I have to bathe, make my intentions, and take up ihram at some point before I arrive in Jeddah. The best…
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…that the government “dole” posed a more serious threat than poverty. What changed their minds? They changed their minds for a few reasons: people needed help and churches couldn’t provide it. Calls for revival didn’t bring in either souls or dollars. A widespread critique of capitalism reemerged to characterize suffering as a result of systemic rather than personal failings. It’s also worth noting that most folks didn’t change their minds entirel…
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…busers remain in positions of power to abuse again. The sort of meaningful change that would actually protect LGBTQ+ Episcopalians never occurs because that would mean acknowledging, publicly, that The Episcopal Church has a systemic abuse crisis in the first place. The denomination can say what it likes about being a bastion of inclusivity. The fact is, it’s not safe for LGBTQ+ people. And finding more elaborate ways of talking about the preventi…
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…eteronormative uncontracepted sex in monogamous marriage.” Sections 243 and 299 would also disappoint any divorced and remarried Catholics who want to receive Communion openly. Pope Francis says they should be treated with care and kindness and respect, but he stops short of giving them access to receiving Communion. He offers the same condescension to LGBT Catholics in Section 250 when he says should be treated with care, kindness and respect, bu…
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…region’s geographic mutability. It is a place and a people that understand change. However, throughout the twentieth century, with the acceleration of oil exploration, levee building, saltwater intrusion, land subsidence, coastal erosion, and sea-level rise, the natural and human capacity to adjust to change has reached a breaking point. Some say the balance is already broken. Some say there is no turning back. Out of this bleak picture was born t…
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…rate economic disadvantages that can be traced directly to federal housing policy. Remedying that is an enormous task, and would be very expensive. But we need to understand the history of this public policy to see how we, using our federal, state, and local governments, created the conditions that we see in Ferguson and in other low-income African American ghettos today. A major argument of your “The Making of Ferguson” is that we cannot excuse p…
Read More…at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “…
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