Religion Dispatches
…appen in international airports the world over. I and every feeble-on-their-feet person gets to keep our shoes on. I get to keep all my clothes on, including both scarves, even though one is not even covering anything I wish to observe discretion about. Like poverty, in America, some people have to suffer an attack on their dignity and this is legitimated by the nature of the institutions of power. Well, that’s the harsh part of my airport experie…
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…m presidents. The most moving and unifying moment was when the brilliant 22-year-old Amanda Gorman, our nation’s first young poet laureate, performed her poem, “The Hill We Climb.” She grabbed me at the beginning with “we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished” and didn’t let go. She didn’t turn to religion for solace and preaching, but did invoke the Bible for a popular image of peace, “Scripture tells us to…
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…ucially, though, three of the court’s most conservative justices—including newcomer Neil Gorsuch—dissented in the reversal, suggesting that nationwide marriage equality and its attendant rights and privileges could be more precarious than any of us would like to admit. Arkansas anti-gay dissent, by Gorsuch is grotesque. And reason SCOTUS taking up Colorado cake case is clearly Gorsuch. As I wrote in March: https://t.co/OWod6A38hx — Michelangelo Si…
Read More…her. So you can’t make an adjustment based on that. By this time: the-third-day-after, I would think we’d be some where closer to normal, albeit a new normal. A normal, renewed by the events of the fast, the epiphanies, the transformations, the growth and realizations, lessons learned or taken to heart. I’m still not quite on any non-fasting schedule yet. Generally I do not need a clock (with or without the adhan) to get me started before sunrise….
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…Congress to mandate that children learn from WCTU-approved materials. Textbook companies adapted their texts to meet the WCTU’s standards for what passed muster as proper Temperance Education, uniformly taking positions that marked alcohol, opiates, and tobacco as damaging, morality-eviscerating substances, sometimes taking shots at caffeine and spices too. The WCTU wanted two things from this: to reshape children’s morality so that they would ab…
Read More…s debates. This month my hometown of Lititz, Pennsylvania has become a case-in-point. The town is divided because the Warwick School District–my alma mater–is paying more than $3500 in taxpayer money to host a series of student assemblies with conservative firebrand Pam Stenzel. Nationally recognized for her advocacy of “abstinence-only” sex education, Stenzel has a reputation for making intemperate and unsubstantiated claims. Profiling her last y…
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…ernment engaging in any oversight of their financial activities. Religious freedom and all. The committee staff report on Copeland’s ministry revealed the lengths to which Copeland’s Eagle Mountain International Church and Kenneth Copeland Ministries went to avoid oversight: EMIC/KCM’s response to the Committee and its public statements made it clear that EMIC/KCM did not intend to cooperate with the Committee’s request. . . . Several former emplo…
Read More…de. Truth Wins Out compiled this list: • Seth Walsh, the Bakersfield, CA 13-year-old who hanged himself from a tree in his back yard after years of being bullied, died Tuesday afternoon after nine days on life support. Police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself. “Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears,” Police Chief Jeff Kermode said. “They had never expected an outcome…
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…pathy in the first place. But can you really have the right theory about a book if the book teaches you to love your neighbors as yourselves, but your theory about it demands that you stifle the character traits most intimately associated with love? If your theory about the Bible leads you to ignore or refuse to hear the suffering cries of your gay and lesbian neighbors, wouldn’t that be a reason to rethink your theory? Put more forcefully, how ma…
Read More…it. A coup is by nature a secretive cabal carried out by a small number of high-ranking military and political leaders. Hundreds of high school principals and newspaper columnists are unlikely to have been in the inner circles of such conspiracies. They are, however, likely to have been Erdogan’s political opponents. In the years leading up to the coup, Erdogan lost the initial support of the Gulen movement as news of corruption within his adminis…
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