Religion Dispatches
[Jump to Update.] When I reach Dr. Ronald Yeomans on his cell phone Thursday evening, he is out fishing—just as his wife Helen has said he would be. After all, Dr. Yeomans has put in two long days at work. On Wednesday and Thursday he saw more than twice the usual number of patients at his abortion clinic, Aid For Women, in Kansas City, Kansas. But then, this has been an unusual few weeks. Since mid-June, Dr. Yeomans (and the other abortion prov…
Read More…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
Read More…eteorite? Bomb? End of the world? We were freaked out. No television, cell phone, internet service. There was no way to find out what happened. Later that night, in the Mayan village, the men gathered outside our hut, talking about it in hushed voices. Lacking any better answers, my husband offered the theory that perhaps it was from aliens. We learned the source of the explosion the next morning. At 8:59, the space shuttle, taking a detour due to…
Read More…very country across the African continent. She told AFP the magazine’s two phone lines ring off the hook. But there is still a lot of opposition. Copies in some eastern Ugandan shops have been burned, and distributors in the west have been threatened. Nabagesera says she herself was threatened with legal action after one issue was delivered to a church. And Uganda’s ethics minister warned Nabagesera she is at risk of arrest for “promoting homosexu…
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…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…
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…ect of both personal and corporate prayer. When he speaks to his mother by phone from Libya, she asks if he has felt the prayers coming from his home as well. He tells her that he has felt them and reports, “Maybe it was others’ prayers strengthening me, keeping me afloat.” This is precisely the kind of hope that prayer can inspire that should become central to the understanding of it for those of us who do not engage in prayer. Though the old aph…
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…lace each March, complete with cute little bags where you can put your cellphone and stop looking at it for awhile. There’s a clear Jewish inspiration (unplugging day goes from Friday evening to Saturday evening, just like Shabbat), but there’s no overtly religious content, and the organization is explicit about wanting to reach people of all backgrounds. When I spoke with Reboot communications manager Tanya Schevitz earlier this year, she said th…
Read More…anization for Marriage (NOM) urgently called on its supporters to get more phone calls into Senate offices. NOM is urging Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos to use his power to keep marriage from coming to the floor for a vote. Meanwhile, Archbishop Timothy Dolan is getting increasingly shrill in his efforts to stop the shift toward equality. This week, on his official blog, he wrote: “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in N…
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…ued until nightfall. They continued until counselors and nuns in habits outnumbered wild-eyed parents. Then some guy came over and asked for identifying information about their children—jewelry, tattoos, dental records. Two women went outside and threw up. A man who was shot while watching the premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado this July remembers that he was sitting in the fifth row of the theater. When the theater filled with s…
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…r “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. I am a relapsed Catholic, and thanks to my friend, I am also a repentant Deadhead. Dear Jesus, let me confess: I even wear Birkenstocks. Shannon. Deadshow, Deadhead. Dominquez Hills, 1990. Photo by ChasM3/https://www.flickr.com/photos/chasm3/ “Sugar Magnolia,” however, still…
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