Religion Dispatches
…e Francis went for an walk alongside the north pool of the 9/11 Memorial Plaza to meet with ten families who lost loved ones at the twin towers and to participate in an interfaith service with over 600 religious leaders from the New York area. We have come a long way from 2001, but the hurt and pain remained in the faces of many present, including Tim Rogér of Rochester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines…
Read More
…evelation, for example—as metaphorical. Thus, the Qur’an promises that in Paradise, there will be gardens, running water, and ripe fruits. The righteous will be clad in silk and recline on couches, ready to be waited on and to receive the attention of houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to t…
Read More…t 7pm—Central time—I’ll be joining a panel at Marquette University’s Islam Awareness Week. (This is an occasion during which Muslim students attempt to draw one’s awareness to parts of Islam one is unaware of. It’s like getting to know the neighbor you might not wish you had.) The topic for the panel is ‘Does Religion Still Matter?’ (Cramer 004E, if that means anything to you.) Before I tell you how I decided to answer, let me describe some other…
Read More
…Your Fault, a series on blame in contemporary society by RD’s The Cubit. AA: Is it fair to say that the psychological mechanisms we use for blaming are tuned for judging human individuals? BM: Yes. Because that’s the only place, and the only context, in which we can actually learn this. The way my research group has thought for a while about how blame emerges developmentally and gets refined in the course of growing up in a community, is really…
Read More
…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…
Read More
…ompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the…
Read More
…orted in the journal Nature as suggestive evidence that there may be more parallels between human and non-human ritualistic behavior than previously thought, the story has been feverishly touted by news outlets as evidence that chimps “believe in God.” Ritual, which can include such behavior as tooth brushing, is not necessarily correlated with belief in the supernatural. But religion, in an age and culture that values science and hard data, looks…
Read More
…l the communications were recorded in French, and messages arrived from Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Brown, Montesquieu, Robert E. Lee, Confucius, Robespierre, George Washington, Jesus and Toussaint Louverture. And that’s an abbreviated list. While the Cercle Harmonique itself was small, they occupy a unique historical space. Their séance table was an intersection of southern religion, Catholicism, the Atlantic world, black politics a…
Read More
…ct, what I originally imagined as one project ended up growing into two separate books that are connected by, if nothing else, an overlapping set of questions in my head. So, rather than leave things out, I have just about finished a second book that should be out before the end of 2018. This book, The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an African American Secular, could also be understood as both a prequel and a sequel to Spirit in the Dark. Where b…
Read More
…tside Episcopal churches—they experience them within Episcopal churches at alarmingly high rates, too. And the denomination’s structures (canon law included) have consistently failed to protect them. New data reveals the scope of the abuse crisis Buried deep in the Reports to the General Convention are the results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Metho…
Read More