Religion Dispatches
…and they said, “It might.” One of those whom I asked was the late Dr. Nasr aAbu-Zayd, who also offered this consolation: “People have a short memory, it will blow over.” I had no idea if five years was long enough for it to “blow over” when I applied for visa to make hajj this year. I also had no idea if the people who work in the embassy connect every detail of your life with your passport and visa requests. I know when I come into the United Sta…
Read More…lly in the person’s own best interests: you offer to pay your seatmate to vacate, or you claim that contraception is harmful to women. Third, if none of that works, you create costs for both the authority attempting to regulate you and the innocent bystanders around you in the hopes that if you create enough problems the authority in question will cede way (in other words you block the aisles for a 10 hour flight, or you file lawsuits and cost the…
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…er own country, and has lent her considerable status to the grassroots India Against Corruption campaign as the movement evolves. What some are calling India’s Arab Spring has been more like a summer of discontent, complete with demonstrations and arrests, all in support of this epic fight against government corruption—what Anna Hazare, whose hunger strike made headlines, has named “India’s second freedom struggle.” I was glad to have the chance t…
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…individuals and families spiraling into debt is now being celebrated once again. While last year was the year of reserve and frugality, we are now back where we belong: in the season of spending. While not reviving the post-September 11 rhetoric of shopping as an act of nationalism, we are once again being encouraged to spend—and told that spending is good for us. While disagreeing with this particular logic, I do agree that shopping is an ethica…
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…provides a steady stream of f-bombs, and from nearly start to finish it is awash in booze. At one point Don Cheadle’s character, a morally ambiguous lawyer named Hugh Lang, screams out, “Do we have any f**ing grace, here?” Spoiler alert: Yes, we do! Flight is so chock-full with intertextual Christian references, both of the heavy-handed and subtle varieties, that it’s a veritable “Where’s Waldo?” of religious allusions. Pay attention, for instance…
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…dy had printed out, has been changed. Instead of arriving in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia at around 9:30 p.m., I arrive around 7:00 p.m. 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 or…
Read More…riking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exemption if granting it impacts the rights of others (in this case, the companies’ em…
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…
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…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…
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…!,” between a blurry “photo” and a pull quote informing readers that the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismiss any sort of faith in angels, they belong to a category that also includes ghosts and UFO abductions, clairvoyance and Sasquatch. There are reasons for such dismissals, of course. Many pop cultural representations of angels borrow extensively from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at re…
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