Religion Dispatches
…at, and I apologize for being part of such a mean gesture. In fact I had a phone conversation with a prominent American imam last night—in Islam, we say subhanallah at such coincidences—and he mentioned in passing how offended many white American Muslims were by this very kind of gesture. On reflection, I can see why. I don’t find racial insensitivity humorous directed at me. The least I can do is not support it. And the least I can do is the leas…
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…cross religion, science, and society. I reached out to Levinovitz over the phone to discuss organic food, birth control, alternative medicine, and the role of naturalness in explaining COVID-19. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. When did the concept of “natural” first grab your attention? When I was working on food I noticed that people often use “nature” and “natural” as their justification for whatever it was that they happe…
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…n edited and condensed version of our conversations, which took place over phone and email. FEBRUARY 2017 Since the election, how has your relationship with white evangelicalism shifted? Sundays are hard. The last few months, as the temperature has turned up, I just get angry when sermons don’t address the injustice and violence in our country. I do not want to leave the first church that ever felt like a home to me. I’ve spent my entire Christian…
Read More…or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous consequences—but you feel complicit, somehow, when you pa…
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…A despite their best efforts to shoot themselves in the foot. In that case, 17,000 people die in the first year, around 25 million will lose insurance, and the GOP will cease to exist as a national party. More realistically, liberals are going to have to do some very heavy lifting over the next few years. It’s going to be much harder work than letters and phone calls to Congress, protests, or meetings with like-minded friends. You can point to the…
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…heir conscience. Olympics Postscript: Team LGBT beats every country that criminalizes gays Outsports reports, “The publicly out gay, lesbian and bisexual Olympic athletes in Rio outperformed expectations, with 25 of the 53 publicly out athletes winning medals.” Together they accounted for 14 medals (accounting for team sports such as the four out women played on the US basketball team). Notes Outsports, “Those 14 medals beat every single country t…
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…ts to challenge the decision at a press conference that took place on Sept. 16. “This is the day for us a church to be able to stand strong particularly for family protections,” he said. “I think that people have tried to wrongfully paint this as people trying to dictate what’s happening in the bedroom. For us it’s not about that at all, it’s about protecting the children.” Orozco specifically criticized the National Evangelical Association of Bel…
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…mmunities of Violence. I was working on a massacre of Jews that happened in 1321. All the documents talked about this massacre, but none of them gave any numbers. I came to the conclusion that this probably was not a big massacre. It happened in a tiny town in the middle of the mountains. They probably were talking about it as a massacre in order to justify the fines on the populace. You might say it’s like people talking about anti-Semitism in or…
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…night dancing with, someone who I had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered around Boston I felt a momentary panic. Where could I ever go to find her again? Last week, just in time for the Feast of All Soul’s Day, celebrated each year on November 2, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a new Instruction regarding the…
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…(correctly) at the uncertainty consuming me. Similar messages poured in by phone, email and social media throughout the day. It was as if someone in my family had died and people felt compelled to offer me condolences. The reality of living in a country in which the most blatant expressions of Islamophobia and other forms of hate are normalized does worry me. Even as Trump flip-flops on his promise of a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims ente…
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