Religion Dispatches
…xious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very least, I thought I had a responsibility to the Muslim students on campus. (Then again, I really had no idea what to do. I just thought I had to do something, anything, to help.) Walking into our prayer space, which was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a frien…
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…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…
Read More…u believe – of anti-marriage-equality Catholics and evangelicals to Mexico City, the culmination of weeks of protest organized by the National Front for the Family. Days before, the Supreme Court ruled that adoption by same-sex couples should be considered, like other adoptions, according to the best interest of the child. In preparation for Saturday’s anti-marriage-equality march, Mexico City officials lit the Angel of Independence monument in ra…
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…ation nationwide, they are but a small fraction in this northeastern city, numbering just over 40,000. Despite their small numbers, the church is rumored to have spent upwards of 100 million dollars to build this temple, located in a prime downtown location, and constructed with detailed craftsmanship rarely seen in contemporary buildings. In terms of sheer size it rivals the nearby Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, and the headquarters…
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…ed chicanery; it was terrifying, and all too human. The wolves outside the city walls threaten the life of the city. The wolves hidden among us may threaten the city even more. These are powerful mythic tropes, both the Greek and Roman ones. But the werewolf appears to be an Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, rather than a Greco-Roman, myth. And what is most striking about these “werewolves” is that they are even more wolf-like than the wolves are. More pr…
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…unning, astounding, gorgeous—exhausting to the eyes and the thesaurus. The city itself is tougher to characterize. We’re dealing with a millennium of history in one city. Was it rich or poor? Filthy or pristine? Christian, Muslim or Jewish? It seems silly to pretend that we can say with any authority what it is and was. Because in their days as in ours, it depends on who’s looking. “Jerusalem 1000-1400” runs until January 8; “Faith and Photography…
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…lking Dead” set—and that’s not just because the only viable concern in the city is a special effects monster-make-up school. The city itself is literally rotting. Small trees sprout from crumbling brick buildings that line downtown streets that once thrummed with people. The modest wood-frame houses in the neighborhood that once abutted the Wheeling & Pittsburgh Steel mill are rotting, overgrown with ivy and weeds, and largely abandoned. Just outs…
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…ted for assault. It was only after the highest Christian authorites in the city intervened that the Israeli government rescinded its order that the Armenian seminarians be deported from the country. While Jewish-Christian relations in the city surely are in need of some repair, these problems seem small in the face of deteriorating Jewish-Muslim relations. But while Jewish-Muslim tensions dominate the headlines, most Israeli liberals feel that the…
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