Religion Dispatches
…question of moral identity. The Doctor learns the mysterious fact that the city-ship’s populace has repeatedly voted to forget, which is—spoiler warning!—that their city is built on the back of an enormous space whale, the last of its kind, and they are torturing it to keep their city moving through space. This puts the Doctor in a difficult situation—he can’t let the beast go, because it would cause the city to crumble and its inhabitants to peri…
Read More
…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
Read More
…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…
Read More
…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…
Read More
…natives of Fes) were welcoming, and the city does serve to break down many US stereotypes of the Arab world. It is a developing city, not dependent on oil wealth. Women dress as they please, as do men. Mosques are ubiquitous, if often below capacity. The old city, a UNESCO world heritage site, contains the homes Maimonides and Ibn al-Arabi. The music at the festival was absolutely wonderful, and did speak in a language beyond language. Now, they j…
Read More…of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact. Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as suspect. The mayor made a rousing speech during the Park51 controversy, but he has not internalized or exemplified those words. We are a community besieged by Islamophobia. Instead of building strong, resilient…
Read More
…a senior editor at the South China Morning Post, criticized the Hong Kong city government for its “lukewarm” response to the city’s selection as the host of the 2022 Gay Games, which will make it the first Asian city to host the event: It goes to show that officials pay lip service when it comes to supporting the city as a diverse and inclusive society. They only boast about how multicultural the community is or take pride in identifying Hong Kon…
Read More
…in realism, a belief that knowing the city will lead somewhere beyond the city.” Preib, while intent on becoming a Chicago writer—the kind of writer, like Ben Hecht or Nelson Algren or Mike Royko, who makes sense of the city, its moods and multitudes, finding a form to preserve some fragment of its stories and voices—is not your average daydreamer scribbling at the side of the road. The car he’s driving in the above scene is a squad car, and his…
Read More
…cans who were displaced by urban renewal, by slum clearance in the central city, moved outside the central city, north and west, into places like Ferguson. Since African Americans were prohibited from living in most other places, those communities became predominantly or nearly all black. So that’s how Ferguson became the Ferguson we know today. Why is this history so important for understanding the African American protests in Ferguson last Augus…
Read More
…erhaps I am stuck in the 1990s, but I couldn’t help but think that New Cap city was an homage to New Jack City, the drug-laden morality tale of Nino Brown and the Cash money crew. By the end of the show Tamara has become a souped-up, invincible mercenary who has dispatched everyone and walks the streets of New Cap City as though she owns them. Her “turning” from a sweet, innocent girl into the “awakened” cynical killer who is going to hold her new…
Read More