Religion Dispatches
…s alike. I also like that there is a woman in a white headscarf making eye contact with the photographer behind the central figure. Something was happening in that space where Alland set up his camera. What’s your next book? My next book will describe polyculturalism at a larger scale, and is inspired by African American Islam and the long and rich history of representing Islam in American popular culture. While there are extensive literatures on…
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…mbat-related, researchers have documented what is called secondary trauma: contact distress, of a kind. In one 2004 study of social workers on cases stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks, researchers found that the more deeply therapists were involved with victims, the more likely they were to experience such trauma. The same associations have been found in doctors working with survivors in war zones. Still, “mental health evaluations of therapists t…
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…possible to travel between them. If we understand your work correctly, the contact between those planes comes at a sacred center, which also links our sense of earthly order with some symbolic experience of chaos. Yes, archaic religious people did not fear chaos, because their sacred symbols convinced them that order and chaos are not ultimately enemies. At the sacred center there is a coincidence of opposites that harmonizes the two. But modern p…
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…note that the power on display Tuesday night was deeply rooted in personal contact. That’s how the ground game works. Democrats truly committed to taking back the nation should be prepared to do some door-knocking next year. A lot of door-knocking (calling, texting). That kind of personal connection does two things: it lets average voters feel heard. It also solves a lot of messaging debates. Do white working-class voters need to hear a strong eco…
Read More…ered that I was still in ihram, and I resisted my temptation to kill it on contact! To understand Muzdhalifah, think back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saw), when there were NO electrical lights, NO paved roads, NO phones. There was no way for anyone to know that a caravan had arrived until it was pretty near to its destination. Then a missionary was sent to alert the people of the town that that caravan had nearly arrived and was camped in…
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…populations, and engage in sector-based plans for recovery, mass testing, contact tracing and social distancing, are tantamount to social and ethnic cleansing. Some will cringe at such language. However, when Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman offers up her city as a “control group” for experimentation, it’s a sober description of where we are. And we’re not here due to a lack of resources or expertise. The “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience,” publishe…
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…about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out there?, I wonder. Yet I cannot help but detect a kind of desperation in our quest for extraterrestrial intelligence. I can’t point to any single source of this feeling, but I can’t shake my sense that these efforts, as much as I support them, are sympto…
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…anities at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work examines religious contact zones of the 19th century, a time when America was being dramatically reshaped by immigration, westward expansion, the end of slavery, and innovations in religion. Ann Taves focuses her work on human experiences that are atypical and abnormal—in books such as Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Thin…
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…police taking in men for questioning, and local media reported that mobile phones and HIV/AIDS medication were confiscated from the premises. That the FPI prompted such a raid is no surprise; that the authorities followed the Islamist group’s tip to round-up an innocuous gathering that violated none of Indonesia’s laws is also disappointingly familiar… Ultra-nationalistic fervor opens space for attacks on minorities as a way of gaining popular att…
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…hat movement will you start? ### The authors invite you to engage with them further: You can learn more about Jacqueline N. Font-Guzman’s work and find her contact information here, and Bernard Mayer can be reached at berniesmayer@gmail.com….
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