Religion Dispatches
…eek, I came home after a five week journey driving around the country. The trip had been inspired by a need to prove to myself that all of America hadn’t gone crazy and that there remain good decent folk who haven’t bought into the fear-peddling of Glenn Beck, the Christian Reconstructionists, the Tea Partiers, and Fox News. My suspicions, thankfully, were correct. My entire time on the road, not one person told me that President Obama is a covert…
Read More…er more ossified society, such that those with money—including significant numbers of America’s small Muslim community—were liable to hold onto their wealth even as many around them found it harder and harder to get by. They arrived and became part of the top several percent. I am afraid that many of these folks have confused the circumstances that have enabled their prosperity with their efforts. It undoubtedly takes courage to get up and come ha…
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…f us, well, we just waited. I finally dozed off until the next “Follow me” round. This was only to point out our bags, in addition to the newly retrieved ones. All of them were piled on a huge cart that was pulled to the next “Follow me” destination. About midway we are divided into a men’s “follow me” line and a women’s “follow me” line. The women’s line was allowed to load the bus first. No, we were not sent to the back, in case you’re wondering…
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…ill go to Mina, etc. There is still no address for the hotels, but a local phone number. There is also information about processing customs at Jeddah, meeting the tour guide, and information that says “the group” will proceed to Makkah—which means the first will have to wait for the last person, which is the beginning of feeling like you are a group. They even include suggestions to “get to know” your fellow travelers. I still had no idea what wer…
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…ggerated statistic that counts all baptisms and births, but not the actual number of churchgoers), representatives of the religion—and representations of it—have managed to become fixtures in popular culture. I don’t have a complete explanation for this, but I would point first to the post-9/11 zeitgeist. In the last decade, there was a national and global debate about the place of religion in politics. Many looked to the American past to better u…
Read More…coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is positively voyeuristic! Let’s face it, gay sex is completely titillating to heterosexuals, especially con…
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…n and Hezbollah—still, nothing was invented. A Muslim world that lacks in groundbreaking scientific research also lacks in groundbreaking destructiveness; even in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, confirmed in Pakistan and suspected in Iran, the search has been derivative. There are other senses in which the Muslim world, by and large, has not ‘excelled,’ and for that perhaps we should be grateful, not caustic. For you cannot claim the p…
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…backlash, concert bans and even death threats, they’ve always stood their ground. “My life spent with rights mortgaged off to your sentiments / My history erased from our books like they were yours to claim,” Sinno sings in their song “Tayf” (“Ghost”), a solemn but defiant tribute to a Beirut gay bar that was shut down by Lebanese authorities in 2013. But Sinno has struggled to process this painful ordeal: He wasn’t prepared for his fans to come u…
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…a’s auto-da-fé came not only in the comments section, but in nasty emails, phone calls, and demands for his firing from Messiah College. As he discovered, the culture wars are real, and practiced even on those (like Fea) who largely have been critical of Obama’s actual implementation of his promises about faith-based policies. More important than these blogosphere wars, however, is understanding something deeper about these screeds about Obama as…
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…And nobody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowe…
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