Religion Dispatches
…ire-in-the-belly of a Donnie Osmond. His greatest hits? “Nancy Pelosi’s numbers have being going down a chute faster than a Jet Blue flight attendant” and “President Obama’s idea of a rogue state is Arizona.” As for the substance of Romney’s speech, what was most notable was the absence of talk about values, let alone religion. Instead, Romney sounded every bit the corporate buyout and turnaround specialist, criticizing the “anti-growth,” “…
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…a bat?, we immediately come upon the problem of differences— —right, a bat flight simulator! But one of the things that we need to recognize is that . . . human beings experience their worlds very differently. I’m very interested in the phenomenon of disagreement. What does it mean when two people look at the same information and they come to different conclusions? To me, that is in some way indexing how deeply ingrained our affective experiential…
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…a disproportionate impact here is that for years now, the holy trinity of American professional athletics—football, baseball, and basketball—has seemed largely impervious to the broader movement toward gay and lesbian acceptance in most other sectors of mainstream culture (not for nothing did Kluwe participate in an October radio panel titled “The Gay Jackie Robinson”—as in, professional sports needs one). This imperviousness to progress has seem…
Read More…endless. The physical motions it requires are simply too unfamiliar to the American gaze. For most Americans, just the sight of the salaah is so alien that they never get to the heart of it. Or maybe it is too familiar. When I first arrived in the United States, I prayed in the library stacks. I prayed in conference venues after sessions were over and people were milling about. I prayed in office spaces. I prayed in classrooms. The past six years…
Read More…one has to be Muslim for at least six months to make hajj. So I go to the American embassy and secure an affidavit stating I have been practicing Islam since 1972. When I brought that to the embassy they said: you need to have a mahram, the male guardian. At the time I was divorced and my son, Muhammad was only six years old, living with his dad while I was away. My father was deceased and all the other living males in my family were not Muslim….
Read More…ocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics 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 returni…
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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…John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, as I waited to board a flight back home to Oslo. I was there on Aug. 14, 2016, when, after years of the “War on Terror,” one of North America’s most important international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the…
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…since the North Vietnamese military had attacked it, and in fact the last American soldiers to lose their lives in the war were defending the airport. After that last helicopter flight not a single person was evacuated by the US military. The “boat people” who fled Vietnam did so on their own. By contrast the Taliban has been remarkably patient. The airport hasn’t been bombarded, and tens of thousands of Afghan people have been able to board US m…
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…rbing ways. And it carried a cost; the Bush administration created a great flight of scientists to the private sector, to foreign countries, and it decimated the morale at some of the premier scientific institutions funded by the US government, the Centers for Disease Control most notably. But the President is wrong to suggest that politics can simply be extracted from scientific enquiry. This simple statement is actually part of much larger misun…
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