Religion Dispatches
…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…
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…. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almost 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such a wonder…
Read More…lly scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problems are beyond our power t…
Read More…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…
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…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…
Read More…onds, people have lined up in front of it to take pictures with their cell phones. They’re distanced from what’s happening around them, oblivious to what it really means. Many reviewers have made the obvious connection to 9/11, and it’s certainly true that the monster’s initial rampage eerily evokes that day’s images. But there’s a deeper level to it. At one point, the characters are caught in the middle of a firefight between the monster and a Na…
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…o a local electronics store to get the ubiquitous, and indispensable, cell phone, when I was approached by a Libyan customer. After learning that I was an American he said “Thank you for helping liberate my country from the dreaded dictator, Gaddafi. May he burn in hell! And as for those who killed your ambassador, may they burn in hell with him!” “They are a disgrace,” he said of the makers of the inflammatory video, “but they are not the cause…
Read More…d. Dustin Lance Black is the Salt Lake City pride parade marshall. He was really excited and supportive of our very simple message and he asked that we be moved to the head of the parade. But I also want to be very careful. We are guests at this parade, and I don’t want to steal other peoples’ thunder. For so many years, the Salt Lake City Pride folks have built this into an institution in the fabric of Utah. I just want to be very thankful for…
Read More…pean_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths besides his own, “european_douchebag” posted the picture under the Reddit tab “Funny,” hoping to get an elbow-in-the-side snickering reaction from the online community. But what h…
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…rowing questions at you so rapidly that you often have no idea whether you really gave the right answer that you really believe or not.” Since survey participants are answering rapid-fire, multiple-choice questions about fuzzy beliefs, they’re likely to be influenced by the context of the survey. In the case of Pew’s science and religion survey, the most obvious influence is in the way that they formed the question. When asked, “Generally, do you…
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