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Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

…everyone also does this manual flush, because, well, I’ve used enough outhouses at amusement parks or natural sights in America with no water to be thankful for what I had. Then I needed to make wudu’ and headed for the nifty wudu’ stations. Unfortunately, these too were saturated with water. Never mind my description before of the drain for removing the waste water—it was there, alright, but like the toilet, I don’t know what made it impossible f…

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Raising Children the Right Way

…olent idiom, Dobson’s Dare To Discipline is perhaps the most startling because it uses violence to describe the non-violent behavior of preschool children. For Dobson, a child who misbehaves is not just naughty, but a “tyrant and dictator” whose behavior threatens not only the peace and quiet of his parents, but the viability of the family and the nation. In other words, the solution to the “potent weapon” of a child’s defiance is loving disciplin…

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Famous Atheists, Fat Ministers, Papal Tweets, and a Mega-Hoax

…o issue a code for how Christians ought to evangelize. No word on how this code effects the use of Chick Tracts. A village in the Philippines celebrates its patron saint, John the Baptist, with a Mud People Festival. Reminds me of my weekend at Bonnaroo 2004. The Pope tweeted—from an iPad, no less. It’s all part of the Vatican’s new multimedia news portal, news.va. Biblical criticism is getting high-tech. A new computer program uses an algorithm t…

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Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

…Schubert, the notorious mastermind of the gays-as-threats-to-children ads used to promote Prop 8 and other anti-gay initiatives in the U.S. The conference also included an “emerging leaders” training track, which provided scholarships to about 260 young people from more than 40 countries and 25 states. A conference organizer estimated that they were part of a group of about 500 under-30 participants out of the more than 3300 who joined at least p…

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In Russia It Is Now a Crime to Insult Someone’s Religious Feelings

…less familiar to Western readers than the Pussy Riot trial itself, which caused a sensation in the Western media. (In my opinion, the most nuanced coverage of the events associated with Pussy Riot can be found here, in a piece that I readily admit I wish I had written myself.) The protection of religious believers’ feelings has been enshrined in the Russian Civil Code for quite some time, but making it a criminal offense to insult the feelings of…

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Where Christianity and Islam Collide

…al rule of law than the government does. [They] lay out a social and moral code that governs human interaction, and supplies a context for suffering and poverty, constructing a group identity through which followers can hope to secure their worldly needs, and find some certainty about the hereafter.” It follows that in such places, religion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example…

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Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

…attacks. “I call on The Gambia to fulfil its international obligations to promote and protect the human rights of all persons without discrimination, to repeal all provisions of the Criminal Code that criminalize relations between consenting adults and to put in place an immediate moratorium on arrests on the basis of such laws,” the High Commissioner said. Amnesty International also sounded the alarm on Gambia this week, highlighting the detenti…

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Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry

…notes for this scene in the film read simply: A COWBOY passes the alley. Pauses, looks at ENNIS. ENNIS glares at him. ENNIS (growls) What the fuck you lookin’ at? The COWBOY moves on. McMurtry typed these words about the story: “I was the more stunned when I read ‘Brokeback Mountain’ because I realized that it was a story that had been sitting there all my life, fifty-five years of which have been lived in the American West. There the story was, a…

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Black Women and the Sacred: With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé Takes Us to Church

…cularly black religious folk traditions? To make lemonade out of lemons is code for powerful spiritual practice in the hands of women. Since the beginning of chattel slavery in this country, black women have been magically making something from nothing, conjuring up lives for themselves and their families with nothing but crumbs, dust and ashes. “By giving us an ensemble cast of black women and girls, with songs of joy and pain, beauty and sorrow,…

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Sharbat Gula’s Experience Exemplifies the ‘White Savior’ Lens Through Which Most Americans View Afghanistan

…the norms of her Pashtun culture. Sharbat Gula is a Pashtun with a fierce code of respect, honor, and modesty. The notion that women and girls should not share space with a man without her or her parent’s consent is intertwined with the Pashtun code of conduct, as is the lack of direct eye contact between men and women. In 1984, as McCurry recounted to NPR, Sharbat Gula initially covered her face when he took her photo. It was her teacher who ins…

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