Religion Dispatches
…atable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kio…
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…, the narrator declared, “The Jewish people are coming to Christ in record numbers.” The goal of some Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish groups is the repatriation of all Jews to Israel, and the conversion of all Jews to Christ. Saturday afternoon’s sermons reflected those hopes. The Jewish humor of David Chernoff, one of the Messianic movement’s most prominent rabbis, fell flat when he addressed the crowd. The mostly gentile audience just did…
Read More…I to judge?” statement while aboard the papal plane. Since that fateful in-flight press conference, I have been told countless times (often by well-meaning, heterosexual Catholics) that I should find hope and comfort in the pope because he has opened up the doors to mercy for me and my lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer friends. But mercy, it seems to me, is not the door that LGBTQ people need opened to them. Mercy is an act of love, co…
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…ol, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery. But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, b…
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…gation in Ferguson was not just the result of individual decisions (“white flight”), but also of carefully engineered federal policies intended to prevent white and black people from living in the same places. Aghapour wants us to get better at blaming institutions. When confronted with thorny social situations, he suggests that we first “scale up,” meaning that we situate individual actions within a broader institutional context. Second, he sugge…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
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…before I “lost” the group at the Mumbai airport. After the nearly day-long flight, we still had a four-hour bus ride ahead of us. When we finally found each other, boarded the bus and found boxed breakfasts of chicken salad sandwiches, I relaxed a bit. That was premature. The bus driver went in circles, clocking eight hours to travel 95 miles. Arriving at Osho, my only goal was sleep. But the registrar at the Welcome Center had other plans. First…
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…gned amidst the allegations, along with Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché. On the flight back to Rome, Pope Francis was asked why he felt the need to offer consolation to the Bishops over the sexual abuse scandal in America. Clarifying his comments, he said that his words of comfort were not meant to downplay the situation but that “It was so bad I imagine you cried hard.” He also reiterated “those who covered this up are guilty. Even bishops who covered…
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…ell every six months. But the string of replies to the tweet, as well as a number of pained blog posts, make clear that Driscoll’s rhetoric is at least as alienating to thoughtful Christians across the ideological spectrum as it is titillating to his followers. For those Christians often straining to sustain their identification and affiliation with one or another branch of the Christian family, Driscoll comes off like the ranting, half-drunk cous…
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…high $2.5 million, noting Cook’s “indifference to life” and calling her a flight risk. A few days later, a defrocked priest, described as Cook’s “steady companion,” stepped forward with the cash and promissory note to free Cook. In the days since, the Bishop reportedly has returned to rehab on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, where she stayed in the days before she was booked. Cook is a suspended bishop now, and Episcopal Church officials have begun…
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