Religion Dispatches
…nervous I could hardly sit still, but then they said: well, you need to renew this. And the next day, I went to the US embassy and applied for a new one, the one I have now. Here’s a tip, the fastest way to get a passport is to get one outside the US. Imagine that. But I digress… A friend of mine who lives in Madinah now once wrote a reminder on Facebook, that no one makes hajj except by invitation from Allah. When I saw that I put in my requisit…
Read More…cs wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. In fact, as The New York Times wrote in the same piece, the phenomenon is less Children of Men than Roger & Me, with the closing of rustbelt factories as a prime cause of the flight of young families with children, while at the same time senior citizens started returning to Pittsburgh or other small metropolitan areas for their retirement. In three other areas hurt by vanishing industry, B…
Read More…nning to reach toward the stars, we were becoming emotional androids. “Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings,” Dick wrote. “Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra— but per hominem.” That, in a sense, is the fundamental concern of ABC’s hard-SF soap opera Defying Gravity. The show…
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…dia if they had heard what was going on. Answers came quickly and soon we knew that there were no confirmed shots and that it seemed to have been a false alarm. I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as…
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…ange sides at the appropriate moment. That moment came in August, when the new American President, Joe Biden, announced the withdrawal of the last troops. Methodically, region by region, the resistance fell within days like a house of cards, virtually without firing a shot. At the end, the Taliban simply marched into Kabul and took over. This patient pattern of negotiation and coalition-building, however, has changed the Taliban. Although the move…
Read More…ne of the lead groups in the National Family Front — confirmed to BuzzFeed News that foreign activists were in Mexico City this weekend to discuss forming a Latin American “front for the family.” He also said that Ludovine de la Rochere of the French anti-marriage-equality group La Manif Pour Tous was in town this weekend. The Colombian outlet Semana reported earlier this month that Mexico’s evangelical party, Encuentro Social, had bought a flight…
Read More…d well. As Joffe points out, soon after the transvaginal-as-rape meme took flight, “Will abortion clinic staff who perform the ultrasound be seen as ‘rapists,’ as the provider I mentioned earlier worried? This is a possibility not lost on the anti-abortion website LifeNews, which recently ran the headline, ‘If Ultrasound is Rape, Arrest Planned Parenthood Staffers.’” Trudeau doesn’t get this. He told the Washington Post, of the Texas ultrasound la…
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…rdes in check. I say “probably” because indeed we did: Tunisia was a close American ally in the war on terror, much as we cozy up, time and time again, to vile leaders who use the Islamist bogeyman to crack down on human rights for those human types. Too often, secular regimes in the Muslim world are not democratic. Their secularism is itself an imposition, and often a violent one. Turkey is an instructive example (trivial tidbit: Tunisia’s flag i…
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…am audience? I wrote it because I was annoyed with some writers because I knew they knew better. I said, “There’s bad faith here.” These people are supplying the data but they go along with the lie. But I was also writing it for a number of people having these doubts who needed some data. What I’m saying isn’t brand new, but it’s saying, “Come on folks, let’s be honest about this.” You lead the moral vision of the book with a challenge to protect…
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…n linked to a denial of the Holocaust or the anti-Semitism that led to the flight of some one million Jews from Arab countries between 1947 and 1967. When Prime Minister Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and other right-wing extremists are able to point to this irrational hatred of the Jewish people as the “real” underlying message of the critics of The Occupation, they stir up fears among Israelis that seem to be rationally founded, given the hatred…
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