Religion Dispatches
…e United States is in fact deep, thick, and complex. But this interest, at times referred to as “New Age,” has not necessarily translated well to the television screen. The short-lived television series Kung Fu left a lot to be desired, no? (Although, if one works hard enough, there may be something intriguing in the show related to the implied transcultural geography of inner struggle and “harmony” that brings together the Shaolin Monastery and t…
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…ible.” (emphasis mine) Well, okay, that’s two. But as anyone who reads the New York Times style section, you have to have three instances of something for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not cons…
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…any talk of God. Those who struggled to protect, to safeguard, those young lives—and those who lost their lives to the insanity of murder are more important than any appeal to God. We humans alone must remember them, keep the beauty and value of their short lives ever present through our memorials, through our reflexive words, but also through our resolve to determine and then change the patterns of socio-political and economic life that contribut…
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…can, among other things, change the way we think about our “all too human” lives. This relatively new inquiry is often loosely described as “animal studies.” I will admit, I find this whole speculative and ontological debate a bit dizzying—both personally and intellectually. But I’m absolutely fixated on it. I think about it all the time. What would really happen if the abstract, theoretical line between human and animal were to collapse? Or if it…
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…in Edie Windsor’s case, the denial of those rights cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, as I was interviewed by two local television stations this week, I was asked both times about how much my partner and I are affected in material terms: income tax, social security, hospital visitation rights, that sort of thing. Media trained as I was, I tried to steer the conversation toward deeper issues, but both reporters ended up using the detai…
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…m Khomeini International University. Sunni teaching holds that someone’s “true gender” cannot be altered, Kariminia told BuzzFeed News, but Ayatollah Khomeini’s understanding of Shiite teaching is that surgery reveals their “true gender” that may be hidden within. In fact, Khomeini had ruled that sex reassignment was allowed by religious law two decades before Molkara showed up on his doorstep. He wrote about the issue in 1965, just after he was s…
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…hip with evangelical Christianity itself. A deep sense of knowing that the world of Hebrew and Christian scriptures are, in a consequential way, true. An angry, stumbling, ancient G-D. Bewildered community. Mysterious hope that defies logical explanations. Tent pegs through the skull. Innocent animals cut to pieces. Cities laid waste. A burning tower of fire that won’t go out. There is the haunting sense of these stories being more real outside th…
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…onship with Jesus. In the early 1980s, just when Pence was discovering his new “evangelical Catholic identity,”his co-religionists were becoming politicized. Running for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan targeted this group and his election gave many an unprecedented sense of power and possibility. The Rev. Jerry Falwell had access to the White House but a whole other game was being played at the grass roots. Local evangelical churches were writing…
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…y pride flag flies at your Christian college, it is a direct attack on the Word of God, It’s shameful…” ). Personally, I don’t blame the administration for removing a flag whose display they hadn’t authorized. If this was all that had happened, I wouldn’t be bothering to write about my alma mater right now. But something else happened: several days later, The Bench—a beloved slab of concrete on the campus that is frequently (and licitly) tagged wi…
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…the streets of Vancouver’s West Side, I have encountered this mindset many times. One of the principles we instill in our volunteers is the commitment to love—without conditions, without judgment, without patronizing. Building trust takes commitment that won’t mean anything if it comes with conditions. Genuine friendship means welcoming and loving folks as they are, not as we wish or hope them to be. I have witnessed the transformation that happen…
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