Religion Dispatches
…e mahram. So even that year I was denied, a female friend of mine (another American woman) made umrah a alone because she worked it out with the tour agency. This year, I am just plain old old. (Double OLD intended.) I am old enough to travel without a mahram. So actually I am not as nervous about that as I am about the second extenuating circumstance. In 2005 when I accepted an invitation to lead a mixed-gender public ritual prayer on a Friday in…
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…y to talk and to listen. When we don’t live up to that same spirit, all we manage to do is affirm every cynical instinct, every pessimistic expectation that is so pervasive in the politics of abortion and that keeps us from achieving anything together. And our responsibility to uphold these ideals doesn’t end when the conference is over. There is no doubt that we, like others with a stake in the debate, will fall short of our own expectations and…
Read More…children. I never wanted to know the sex beforehand, and for the most part managed to avoid ultrasounds even for medical reasons until the fifth child at the ripe old age of 37. Having miscarried a child just before that pregnancy and being that age, I was considered an at-risk pregnancy. So they wanted to check on the baby. We insisted we did not want to know what the sex was. So they put that reader where the head was then jumped across the litt…
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…. Let the record show, I was not successful, despite my best intentions. I managed to drop that daughter off just in time to head to Oakland as I had told my middle daughter I would. She needed assistance with the baby because her Canadian in-laws gave her a car, which had to be cleared at customs before local registration. Then we went to the farmers’ market, the flea markets, and the swap meet. She insists on using a baby carrier instead of a st…
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…ortal, the fact that we die. You spoke of your parents’ faith. They didn’t manage to pass it along precisely… No, but they were believers to the end, as I said. My father was a very learned man, self-taught, very smart. My mother was a simpler soul, didn’t graduate high school, and was quite a contrast, their two minds. Sometimes I think I’m a blend of the two of them: a little of my dad’s smarts and wisdom and some of my mother’s simplicity too….
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…hat those three criticisms appear to conflict with each other. How can one manage to be all at once a tepid puddle of politeness, and a rigid politically-correct squadron battering down the doors of hapless churches in the heartland and setting fire to any hymnal with the word mankind in it, and a bunch of chin-stroking tweed-clad fogeys unaware of anything after the Enlightenment? Eh, who knows? But allegedly we’ve managed it, as our critics are…
Read More…y functions went into over-drive – people began binging on food, trying to manage the adrenaline rush that was pumping into them. All caused by the incredible anticipation of the expected — and long-awaited — announcement. As I witnessed, and shared, in that explosion of emotion, I thought of similar upsurges of changes in the human condition, and was reminded of the idea of “rapture” in religion, where the human being has become so overcome by a…
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…ausing me problems!”). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) seems to manage self-control, by helping to regulate and evaluate choices. (“No to Chocolate Cake!”) These findings are still new, and brain imaging can only make large-scale generalizations, but the initial results are interesting. It seems that during tests of self-control, our ACC keeps firing, but our DLPFC fires less and less over time. In other words, we keep evaluating and a…
Read More…dential candidates would do to end unjustified police shootings of African-Americans. Some progressives thought the BLM activists were disrespectful, particularly in interrupting O’Malley and Sanders when they tried to answer the protestors’ questions. Sanders supporters in particular have been quick to point out on Twitter and elsewhere that the Vermont Senator was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, and that his populist economic platform woul…
Read More…fessor Sullivan’s objection to the notion of religious freedom? Addressing American liberals and the dissenters on the Court, she writes: You cannot both celebrate religious freedom and deny it to those whose religion you don’t like. Human history supports the idea that religion, small “r” religion, is a nearly ubiquitous and perhaps necessary part of human culture. Big “R” Religion, on the other hand, the Religion that is protected in constitutio…
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