Religion Dispatches
…ople. And our god is that God: the one who makes water flow from the rock (Numbers 20:11); who surprises us all the time by blessing us in the least likely circumstances. Mr. President: You need to understand this. You need to work with this, but very, very carefully. Because, like it or not, the endgame in this election is going to be about which candidate does religion better, I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the proble…
Read More…e thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a leaderless, open-source movement. That means, unfortunately, that the nuts have free rein. When I last visited Occupy Wall Street, there was indeed a concatenation of weirdos, from Old Left grandmas to anarcho-synd…
Read More…we want a voice that can speak for us.” Still, despite the pro-Santorum sentiment, Gingrich brought the crowd to its feet with some of his responses to questions. Among his big applause lines: his statement that stem cell research was “never about science,” but about “the secular left” using “science to justify desensitizing us” to the “sacredness of life as a gift of God.” Others included his proposal to issue executive orders within two hours of…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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…he world. I am a part of the world.” After watching the movie for a second time, Chassé came away with more questions than she had originally—only this time, her questions were more nuanced. She wants to read Barack Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, which is frequently referenced in the movie. She really wants to read George Obama’s book, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival. She’d like to under…
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…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…
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…nstrumentation had been replaced by the sheen of digital keyboards. By the time the music reached the third measure, I sensed the dawning of something even more hideous. The melody disappeared entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat pulse in the fashion of light pop radio. Gone were the jaunty, urbane syncopation…
Read More…akkah, and we will see women and men equally as prayer leaders. Until that time, it continues to be an event. Only two official fatwas were given against the women-led prayer and one of them was from Saudi Arabia. At the time I asked some colleagues whether they thought the fatwa would be a problem if I sought to secure a visa to perform my hajj and they said, “It might.” One of those whom I asked was the late Dr. Nasr aAbu-Zayd, who also offered…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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