Religion Dispatches
…New Life Church’s World Prayer Center once… …I would like to do that. It’s cheap and they have hotel rooms—prayer closets, they call them. Or take the Crystal Cathedral. Right. Philip Johnson, who was a leading postmodern architect, designed the Crystal Cathedral. So what’s going on? As these systems become more complex, they become more volatile. As they become more volatile, you have to figure out how, in the economic realm, to manage risk. You…
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…Green Line) is not Jewish, similar to Belgium with a 30% Walloon and a 60% Flemish population or pre-1993 Czechoslovakia (54% Czech and 31% Slovak). Israel’s very raison d’etre is to maintain its Jewish exclusivity. David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s first prime minister expressed this principle during a discussion in the Knesset on the 1950 Law of Return, which ensures automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew. “This law is the foundation of the…
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…ding stricter border security, we forget that such measures have grossly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the US. Half of these used to return to Mexico annually, but researchers now estimate that only one-fourth do so today; stricter border enforcement measures since 1994 have staunched the cyclical flow of the return home of millions. The crisis of 12 million “illegal” immigrants is one of our own creation. The missing…
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…many immigrants who are suffering under our current immigration system’s inflexible and categorical laws with no allowance for individual circumstances. I believe that my faith calls me to work to change those laws, stop unjust deportations, give those worthy would-be Americans a chance. Those realities simply don’t match the realities seen by the CIS panelists. They call my version naïve; I think their version is too often just plain mean. Yet we…
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…ing (though achieving it at the expense of refugees and Buddhist monks who fled China at 14 to get an education smacks of bad taste.) The affair has also unsettled the sentiments of those living in India’s predominantly Buddhist Himalayan region, which separates China from India. There were large protests in the capitals of both Ladakh and Sikkim, as well as in the capital Delhi, even though media failed to give much coverage. Western followers of…
Read More…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…
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…a lively yet tame affair—but who would get married on top of a Mardi Gras float? It’s a bacchanal, a last hurrah for fun and games before the repentance of Ash Wednesday. Oh, and Disney, no funerals on Ash Wednesday unless you get a dispensation. So that funeral for the firefly Ray… liturgically incorrect. (Yes, I am a stickler.) The music, especially the so-called Zydeco music—bland. And those beignets that Tiana makes so that Charlotte can look…
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…meat on the table. Country people shy at the thought of giving up their rifles because they feel unheard and neglected by distant power, she says. I believe her; I know her people too. But the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedo…
Read More…e?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
Read More…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…
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