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Hajj Journal: Tawaf: How I Fell in Love…

By Amina Wadud

…here was a black cloth draping the building, with a beautiful calligraphic design actually stitched in gold. But all I could think was, where is my WOW moment? After praying our two rakaats, we stepped down into the inner court which surrounds the Ka’abah. We approached a line of people doing tawaf and fell into step. From the outer ring, this would be a pretty accurate description—falling into step, that is. The tawaf is performed counter-clockwi…

Build the Muslim Community Center at Ground Zero

By Donna Schaper

…respect, an appreciation deficit syndrome, which then drives people, especially young men, crazy. They then do crazy things. If people had respect, young men would not be so crazy. Giving people respect stops terrorism. Telling them they can’t even build something, with their own money, on a property is disrespectful. It encourages more violence, which violence kills more hope. Any religious organization planted at Ground Zero would give people h…

National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

By Donna Schaper

…ove to enjoy your gifts because we know you have them. But only (pick your number) Mexicans or Ecuadorians or whoever can be welcomed this year.” Rereading the Scripture and changing our tone of voice will go a long way. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…a peace agreement, is unacceptable. It is also founded on an activist messianism that includes Jewish sovereignty over the entirely of the Land of Israel. While there are considerable gradations in the Settler Movement (some of it is secular and there are less strident forms of its religious branch), its religious ideology is loosely based on these core principles. Settler Zionism has been enormously successful but it always had a population prob…

Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…es, as The Ram, Randy, and Robin. Yet, as with religion itself, and multitudes of other social structures, the crux of the matter of identity is the human body in all its aged protuberances, its scarified flesh, its rotund, risqué, and otherwise resolute features. That many major US film critics (Ebert, Turan, Hoberman, Scott, et al.) praised Rourke’s performance and ignored the religious dimensions shows how little, again, the news media has any…

Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

By Gabriel Mckee

…hich is where the title comes in. In his introduction to the play, Shanley describes the existential question that was the seed of the play: Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort? Have you ever defended a way of life you were on the verge of exhausting? Have you ever given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed? Have you ever told a girl you loved her and felt the faint nausea of eroding conviction? The…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…an an attempt to signal to the Trump-hoodooed base that their white bona fides were all in place, despite their inability to limit the bill’s direct relief to white working-class domestic automobile-driving Red Man chewers. You can’t win ’em all, sometimes you gotta help those big city folks too, you know. As deep as the scar of racism runs in American society, though, there’s something even deeper at work here. Stoehr is right to point out the ec…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…oincided with his arrival in New York, after more than thirty years at Williams College, where he now chairs Columbia University’s Department of Religion. He is attempting to reorganize the department’s faculty around problems, rather than religious traditions or academic disciplines, in order to create a new, dynamic kind of scholarly community that can be responsive to pressing questions as they arise. RD: A friend of mine saw me reading After G…

Romney Goes to Bat Against Reid in Nevada

By Joanna Brooks

…e fraud, unemployment, and bankruptcy in the nation. Over the last 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…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Athos is considered to be the most sacred geography in the Orthodox Christian world. Its oldest monasteries were built in the 10th century, and there are currently twenty of them (19 Greek and one Russian Orthodox) scattered along the lovely coast of a nearly forty-mile peninsula not far from Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city. No women are permitted to set foot on this peninsula (nor are female animals larger than chickens). Athos is als…