Religion Dispatches
…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…
Read More…e online community site. The image, of a young Sikh woman playing with her phone while waiting in line, included the caption “i’m not sure what to conclude from this.” No, “european_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths be…
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…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…
Read More…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…
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…the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.” I suspect they’re right; re…
Read More…lly scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problems are beyond our power t…
Read More…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…
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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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…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…
Read More…d that the film was intended to be a provocative political statement assailing the religion. He denied being Sam Bacile, the pseudonym for the video’s purportedly Israeli Jewish writer and director, but AP said the cellphone number it called for a telephone interview with Bacile on Tuesday matched Nakoula’s address. —- For more RD coverage of the events in Libya see “Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuses,” by Haroon Moghul — ed….
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