Religion Dispatches
…it came immediately upon the heels of the birth of my second grandson. One minute we were on the phone and I was describing the birth event and sharing photos on Facebook. The next day, she went to bed, coughed once, and then breathed no more. She was 44. I thought about her when I read in the Qur’an how “every soul will have its taste of death.” So gentle was her moment of passing, and yet so painful has been these few months without her here to…
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…e a video of the performance, despite a Secret Service prohibition on cell phones, because Makana’s guitar is tuned with a smartphone app. Or, reporters are interested in how Obama, his guests, and security detail responded—or didn’t, as it turned out. But this misses the heart of the story, as Makana’s set at the APEC dinner was less dissenting performance than performative utterance—the songs he played, the protest t-shirt hidden beneath the com…
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…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…thored the play Us & Them performed at Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre, wrote a number of pivotal speeches for the Anti Prop. 8 Movement and the popular “It Gets Worse” viral video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign. Fox optioned his pilot “Yearbook” as part of their Diversity program, his pilot, “rare” (about a family of cannibals who immigrates to America) was brought to HBO by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emily Ziff’s Cooperstown Productions a…
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…y Six”) The summer months, usually the least busy time in DC, brought us a number of political earthquakes, each of which, under normal circumstances, would have dominated headlines for weeks. First, the FBI searched the former President’s Mar-a-Lago residence, prompting bitter reactions from a number of Republicans, in some cases openly weighing political violence as a tool of reaction. Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets,” should Trum…
Read More…al burden needs to be shared internationally. But putting that aside for a minute, when the first waves of Syrians started coming into Turkey, their legal status was not recognized. They were called “guests.” There is no such thing in law as guest. Asked about the experience of gay and trans refugees, Kara said: Syrian refugees include Christians, Alevis, Sunnis, and Kurds. These groups experience many layers of discrimination. For instance, the S…
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…itory, punctuated by screams, the crackle of the flames, her mother’s last minute anguish, and painful reaction shots. For some critics, the scene defied language. At the New York Times, Jeremy Egner said: “Oh, man. I can’t even write it.” We wanted to avert our gaze. Even the camera had, after all. Some viewers have found many aspects of the show exceed their tolerance for viewing even virtual pain, reaching a “not-for-me” moment. Yet Bal’s inter…
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…nation, saying statistically women do not want it. I would love to see the numbers. Since when did the Vatican worry about public opinion? Until and unless this very obvious example of Catholic women’s inferiority and marginalization is resolved, the organization is on thin ice to claim moral authority on much of anything. On the substance of religion, the best these writers offer is a series of polite questions. By now several generations of Cath…
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…t amazing soccer play I’ve ever seen. Another moment came in the sixteenth minute of the most recent final in Vancouver. This one was less about the stakes and more about one player’s Federer-like command of the occasion. I mean, Carli Lloyd’s third goal, the one where, breaking free from a defender near midfield, she looked up and, noticing that Japan’s goalkeeper was stationed too far forward, sent a shot over that goalkeeper’s hands and right i…
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