Religion Dispatches
…of the collider lit up with a spirograph of pastel whenever particles made contact. The result resembled a flower; perhaps the dieffenbachia watching plant porn on the other side of the room might have liked this, had they been able to choose. Keats’ hope is that by bringing together the most traditional of prayer spaces—the altar—with the most modern of experimental physics—the LHC—God will take notice. There was at least some response from the f…
Read More…onference Talk, these are incremental but significant changes. The new CHI: 1. Removes the implication that same-sex relationships “distort” love. 2. Removes the imperative that members should repent for having “homosexual thoughts or feelings.” 3. Removes the instruction that Church leaders should refer members to professional counseling. This is especially significant because in times past leaders were encouraged to refer members to practitioner…
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…e and porous becomes a symbol of chaos. Didn’t you write essays back in the 1960s about the “hippies” as a symbol of social chaos? I wrote about their feeble effort to restore the archaic religious consciousness, which does involve a positive reassessment of chaos. And if Matt Bai is right, that image has long been used by conservatives to attack the Democrats by associating them with “60s” culture: “This cultural critique of Mr. Obama… is reminis…
Read More…ns, I must begin to make amends. Actually my list is not that long, once I contact my immediate family. This harks back to two things, in “making the will before hajj” one is also making plans for some kind of finality. If not physically then at least metaphorically. That is probably why so many people actually wish to die at hajj. This is the place and time where one’s life should come before one’s eyes and then washed as if a tsunami of purifica…
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…rofile picture has been changed to a photograph of Celeste Corcoran and her 18-year-old daughter, Sydney. (Celeste, close friend to a senior member of Epstein’s staff, lost both her legs at the knees in one of the bomb blasts, and her daughter suffered severe injuries after being hit by shrapnel.) A press release issued by the Secular Coalition of America (SCA) documented that to date, the Humanist Community at Harvard has played a significant rol…
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…ulie Byrne recently wrote this in a piece for Frequencies, a “genealogy of spirituality”: Tell the children that they can see through the powers that be. Tell the children that they can choose to believe this and not that. Tell them that their bodies are theirs for the making. Something was happening to the girls and women of Yogawoman. Call it religious. Or spiritual. Or good for your posture. Or whatever. But next time you get pissed off, just…
Read More…who bothered to reach out to Colleen McGee, the military public relations contact on this issue, would have figured this out. But when I called her, I learned that I was only the fourth reporter to do so. “Normally, for a story like this, I’d expect about forty calls,” said McGee. McGee cleared up some basic facts: first of all, Phillip Monk was not “officially fired”; rather, he was transferred back to his field (medicine), a transfer he had bee…
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…TBTI human rights for 10 years. World AIDS Day was commemorated on December 1; Pope Francis put out a statement that included a call for “responsible behavior,” which New Ways Ministry’s Robert Shine suggests is notable for its lack of condemnation of people or condom use. US President Barack Obama posted a video statement. On the same day, Gambian voters rejected their intensely anti-gay President Yahya Jammeh, who proclaimed that he invented an…
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…Moghul: Officially, this book began, in very, very different form, when a contact at a major university press asked me to write a textbook about Islam in America. I could not believe my good fortune. I’d taken summer classes at Yale, and still got turned down when it came to college. Fail. But here I was, a Yale reject, about to have Yale publish my book! The irony was delicious. Maybe too tasty. Yale rejected the final product, contending it was…
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…arty establishment in the late-1940s, mythologized the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 1950s, reconsidered the Cold War in the late 1950s, and stunned many Niebuhrians, in the mid-1960s, by opposing the Vietnam War. Any attempt to capture his extraordinary life, thought, and career has to show how and why he changed so many times, and why he attained such a commanding stature in social ethics. Doblmeier pulls it off adeptly, mixing snippets o…
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