Religion Dispatches
…c alternatives like Burning Man, to wholly idiosyncratic practices such as completing paint-by-number paintings of The Last Supper. Feeding the Poor, Housing the Homeless A 7-year study with nearly 15,000 undergraduates at 136 colleges and universities across the country by Alexander and Helena Astin of UCLA’s Center for Spirituality in Higher Education provides some clues to the shaping of contemporary American religious practice. The Astins’ wor…
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…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial clai…
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…ianity around the globe.”⁹ Again, while factually correct that statement becomes deceptive when compared with the account of Islam just one page later: “In the centuries after Muhammad’s death, Muslims spread their religion by conquest.”10 Students reading those pages would naturally come away with the idea that Christianity’s spread was more peaceful than that of Islam. In fact, Islam spread at times by conquest (for instance, in North Africa), a…
Read More…less of what we look like or how we pray or who we love,” he said. Obama’s comments come against the backdrop of rampant anti-LGBT discrimination and violence in country that includes reports of a gay teenager who was recently stoned to death. Jamaica is among the Caribbean nations in which consensual same-sex sexual acts remain criminalized. As we have noted previously, American evangelicals have traveled to Jamaica repeatedly to shore up support…
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…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…
Read More…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…
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…centage points since 2007.” But what CNN really meant was “When asked by a complete stranger, over the phone, to define their spiritual lives in a single phrase, one-third of those adults who responded to this poll (response rate: one in ten), and who fall within an arbitrarily-defined generational frame, declined to tell the aforementioned complete stranger that they were affiliated with any specific religious group.” These are not equivalent sta…
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…g-based Africa director for the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, published a commentary this week arguing that anti-gay discrimination “undermines economic growth and is un-African.” She applauded South Africa’s support for the Resolution on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity that, as we reported last week, was adopted by the UN’s Human Rights Council, while noting there is much more work to be done to safeg…
Read More…lly scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problems are beyond our power t…
Read More…e online community site. The image, of a young Sikh woman playing with her phone while waiting in line, included the caption “i’m not sure what to conclude from this.” No, “european_douchebag” wasn’t questioning which game the woman was playing on her phone, he was referencing the abundance of facial hair on the young woman’s face—a nod towards her Sikh beliefs of not altering her body image. Unaware that others around him might practice faiths be…
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