Religion Dispatches
…ds of American jobs—up to an estimated 127,000. That’s Muslim money buying American goods, creating American jobs. That’s us benefiting from growth in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. That’s the world growing together. The Muslim world’s democratic convulsions—Indonesia preceded the Arab world by roundabout a decade—are responses to economic lethargy, with booming populations ravenous for rights, dignity, and prosperity. In short, thank the world’s la…
Read More…department. Ramadan + deportation: Bonus points on Pakistan International Airlines. Which, like fasting breath (when you don’t eat for a long time, your breath starts to kick), nobody wants to get near. See also safe distance. Namauzea: Namaz is the Persian word for ‘prayer,’ and is traditionally used by all the peoples who were introduced to Islam by Persians or Persophones, which is kind of like a talking cat. (Think Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset wit…
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…unding the National Conservative movement is not without precedent. Between 1800 and 1950, Europe endured what amounted to a second Catholic Counter-Reformation. In the latter portion of the 19th century, predominantly Catholic countries in Europe—which of course European nations have largely been since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia—experienced an upsurge of royalist and irredentist passions to which the Catholic Church often attached itself (for e…
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…all its ecstasies and disappointments, it is a journey to faith that began with the loss of it. [We are grateful to the author, editors, and publishers of All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim for permission to reprint this excerpt. —The Eds.]…
Read More…ted. All cultures have experts that can be consulted for supernatural aid. Americans support a thriving industry of psychics and astrologers and generally don’t care what other countries think about it. However, countries with developing economies are sometimes embarrassed when world attention focuses on their traditional shamans and witches. Recourse to the supernatural is equated with backwardness. The stakes are further raised in this case beca…
Read More…help find the missing airliner by using the power of remote viewing, a form of ESP….
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…r of Rochester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11. Mr. Roger said he hoped the pope would say prayers for the place, for the people, and for his daughter Jean. Praying at a unlighted candle next to the prie-dieu Pope Benedict XVI used on his visit, the Pope offered those prayers silently while looking at the south pool of the memorial. The 9/11 site has become not just a memorial or a museum—it…
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…o a man and a woman. Australia: Tennis stars spar over marriage equality A new development in a long bitter public debate over marriage equality, former women’s tennis star Margaret Court, who is now a church pastor, said she would try to avoid flying Qantas airlines due to the company’s public stance in favor of marriage equality. In response, Martina Navratilova called for changing the name of the Margaret Court Arena, a site of the Australian O…
Read More…er he defrauded parishioners in a Ponzi scheme. Archaeologists unearthed an 1800-year-old statue of the Buddha in India. In Iowa, a pastor is praying that the IRS comes after his church for his political campaign against three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled to allow same-sex marriages. The American Family Association has joined in the campaign against the judges. Finally, the words of one of the Chilean miners rescued after 69 days trapped in…
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…e—ours. Both the supernormal and the paranormal were later picked up by an American writer of glorious talent and wicked humor named Charles Fort. Charles sat in the New York Public Library every day for decades, reading pretty much every periodical in French and English back to 1800 as he looked for reports of “super-constructions in the sky” (what we would now call UFOs) and paranormal people. He found plenty of both. In works like The Book of t…
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