Religion Dispatches
…bsessed with church/state separation and battling creationists. Again, the number of atheists of color has grown, but the atheist movement as a whole has not embraced the issues that people of color struggle with on a daily basis. For example, the wealth gap between blacks and whites is more pronounced now than during the Brown vs. Board era. When I drive around in my community I see scores of abandoned businesses, boarded up buildings, vacant lo…
Read More…In it Jim Glanz points out that Pentagon-employed contractors not only outnumber uniformed U.S. troops in Afghanistan but also that the ratio of contractors to military personnel there is the highest of any war in U.S. history. In a new study, the Congressional Research Service reports that contractors make up 65% of the Pentagon’s overall forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. And this is just for the Pentagon: the new CRS report does no…
Read More…ile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all.” Today, Cuba is more in our reach. As a Cuban-American from Miami I have been raised amidst the existential crisis of the Cuban exile community, a community with a rabid anger towards the Castro regime and simultaneous love and compassion for their fellow Cubans on the island. I, like many children of exiles, was raised holding…
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…, a suburb of St. Louis that represents the outer edge of the city’s white flight, I took stock of the 30-odd people surrounding me. An interesting mix, some of the attendees were longtime activists of color, some seemed to be defectors from the traditional black church, some were white Christian millennials eager to dive into social movements and a few were older white congregants starting to recognize the meaning of privilege for the first time….
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…reating all the chaos. As I boarded my plane for Panama, with a connecting flight departing from, of all places, Houston’s Bush International Airport, visions of interesting frogs and secluded beaches began to recede in my mind as I became fixated on what seemed to be a disturbingly justified question about the citizens of the United States: Are we, um, stupid? When I arrived in Panama, I made my way over to Bocas del Toro, an insanely beautiful a…
Read More…ocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. In fact, as The New York Times wrote in the same piece, the phenomenon is less Children of Men than Roger & Me, with the closing of rustbelt factories as a prime cause of the flight of young families with children, while at the same time senior citizens started returni…
Read More…l suggests that it was not to be. If there’s another chapter left in American Christianity, it will likely require an embrace rather than a flight from the absurdity of its words and practices….
Read More…fanity warning label off the album cover and don my enormous brown Koss earphones (that today would look as though I were at the shooting range or on a flight deck) to even listen to the album for fear that my mother would know that I was even listening to such language. But, as Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, Jr. rightly pointed out in a recent interview, when we’re forbidden in the Ten Commandments from taking God’…
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…life in jail.” The theme of alienation is expressed in the song’s focus on flight—from the law, from society, even from friends. And yet we are drawn to identification with an outlaw so alienated from the rest of the world, he believes the Devil is his only friend. In my ministry as an Anglican deacon, leading ministries that offer food, clothing and, most important of all, fellowship to homeless folks living on the streets of Vancouver’s West Sid…
Read More…atable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kio…
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