Religion Dispatches
…o one can keep away. And my Zappos shoes person recounted almost missing a plane, landing without her bags, but how she and her husband still managed to get there, because “once Allah invites you, then no one and nothing will keep you away.” So I tried to be optimistic. It didn’t help that my daughter accused me of the contrary. Or rather, she asked: aren’t you ever optimistic? I told her about waiting for the visa and how NOT being optimistic was…
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…y plane there is a transcendent realm, where being is eternal. But the two planes of existence are always interconnected, so the religious person assumes that it’s possible to travel between them. If we understand your work correctly, the contact between those planes comes at a sacred center, which also links our sense of earthly order with some symbolic experience of chaos. Yes, archaic religious people did not fear chaos, because their sacred sy…
Read More…. Then, I divide these reasonably between the suitcase that goes under the plane and my carry-on luggage. Remember I have to be in ihram before I reach Jeddah. Then there are the things that need to go in a suitcase but you use them every day. Fortunately, I have all those nifty scent-free products; as far as most of the cosmetics go, I don’t use those on a daily basis. But other things, like toothpaste, I’m not really planning on using a travel s…
Read More…e Atta entered the country legally and in any event could have boarded the plane he hijacked without a driver’s license. In all, FactCheck concluded, “hardly a word in the ad is true.” The Cato Institute’s Jim Harper called the ad “despicable and wrong” and “terror-pandering of the highest order.” In his “Strategy for America” accompanying his anti-“Ground Zero Mosque” campaign, the National Republican Trust PAC’s executive director Scott Wheeler,…
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…the people who were outed in the newspaper.” Earlier, just hours after his plane touched down in Boise on November 1, Kiyimba learned that Rolling Stone had just published a second round of names under the headline: “More Homos’ Faces Exposed.” Identities were published despite a court injunction, filed days earlier, preventing the paper from outing gays. Kiyimba said the injunctions are meaningless in any case as publishers simply wait for the te…
Read More…the United States in connection with the recent shooting down of a Syrian plane by U.S. forces. Graham noted correctly that the Syrian situation is a “powder keg,” and thus requires a careful foreign policy approach. However, he also took the opportunity not only to repeat the banal “Russia and America should fight ISIS together” talking point pushed by both the Kremlin and the Trump administration, but also to accuse Trump’s political opponents…
Read More…e ended up accused of inappropriate behavior on his yacht and his personal plane, sounding very much like an executive of a major corporation, isolated by overwork, over-privilege, and lack of accountability, which, in effect, he had become. Strongmen abuse their people, verbally or even physically, and shelter other kinds of abuse behind opaque leadership structures and authoritarian rules. Mark Driscoll, the butch young fellow who built a Seattl…
Read More…he Hutaree, who were turned in by a Muslim, and Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into a federal office building. I suppose Brennan’s caveat about those charged with “terrorism” is his “out,” but it seems like a technicality. The National Security Strategy makes no such qualifications, arguing that “Several recent incidences of violent extremists in the United States who are committed to fighting here and abroad have underscored the threat to the U…
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…s Royces, “Money Cometh to You” conferences, or Creflo Dollar asking for a plane. Instead, prosperity preachers offer lifestyle management, paths to financial success, and encouragement to remain positive in spite of challenges. In 2013’s Blessed, Kate Bowler describes these gentler takes on prosperity theology as trending toward positive thinking and Christian self-help. She describes the soft prosperity gospel as “therapeutic and emotive, a way…
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…rocuted in his bath; his body was returned to the United States in a cargo plane carrying American casualties from the war in that same region—of which he had been an especially outspoken and eloquent critic. Father Louis was buried in a simple grave next to the monastery, looking out over the hills he hymned so movingly in many of his finest books. A Friend and Fellow The monk who served as Merton’s confessor in those final, tumultuous years at G…
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