Religion Dispatches
…some polls the combined total equals or even outscores the economy as the number one issue on the voters’ minds. Two out of the three campaigns are actively pushing the war back onto center stage. Hillary Clinton recently said: “Since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that.” Well, we may not all know it yet. Apparently Obama and his people…
Read More…ified the divide between professed Democratic concerns over church-state separation and the party’s anxieties about being perceived as hostile to religion. As a candidate, Obama promised strict constitutional protections, only to quietly relent in the face of protests from evangelical figures. Under DuBois’ leadership, the office has elevated the profile of religious leaders it saw as enmeshed in its mission, yet dismissed concerns over church-sta…
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…rick was wrestling with his prophetic vocation even when he was recording TPAB. I don’t think it’s an accident though that tracks from UU didn’t make it on TPAB. Usually a prophecy comes before a lament—e.g. first the Book of Jeremiah then the Book of Lamentations.) What I want to do here is suss out a comparison between the life, times, and texts of the prophet Jeremiah and Kendrick Lamar. Jeremiah was a prophet tasked with guiding the people thr…
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…how “every soul will have its taste of death.” So gentle was her moment of passing, and yet so painful has been these few months without her here to enjoy this Ramadan to share my blog, even; as the only one of my family even interested or capable of appreciating things like Facebook or Twitter and blogging I think about gratitude or shukr then with a new resound. I think about those gifts from Allah that we do not reflect upon. Think about it, ho…
Read More…te a book a while back called The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party. Yes. In Lively’s view the Nazi party was gay. And this is because, well, the Germans actually invented homosexuality. Only it wasn’t an effeminate, easy-to-spot kind of gayness, it was a “butch” homosexuality. Lively is no Fred Phelps, notorious for the crudeness of his hate speech. His tone is measured and he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. But the who…
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…s when our own homes became violent landscapes. And just so, Latin@ queer spaces were always spaces of healing—migratory spaces we journeyed to, to be in solidarity with one another in our shared pain and suffering, but also in our shared joy and triumph. We anointed one another with affirmation and laughter. We created fellowship and communion—because too many of us had traversed dangerous landscapes just to get there in the first place. The Spir…
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…form—they just had to send a letter to HHS stating their intention to not participate in contraceptive coverage. But still this wasn’t good enough for the bishops, who at this point had been joined by evangelicals in pronouncing the mandate a symptom of a secular mindset looking to cow religious believers. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty got involved and made the brilliant strategic move of recruiting the self-sacrificing Little Sisters of…
Read More…raphed a piece of paper on the dashboard of Roeder’s car: It contained the phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, who served two years in prison for conspiring to bomb abortion clinics in 1988. Roeder also told me that Sullenger was present at the lunch with Newman where they discussed “justifiable” homicide, and that Newman had given Roeder the autographed copy of his book just three months before Roeder kille…
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…de’s oil boom gave a jump start to a new crop of commercial Islamic banks, particularly in the Persian Gulf states. By the ’80s, Pakistan, Sudan, and Iran were making efforts to Islamize their entire economies. In the last decade, the industry has expanded dramatically. Dow Jones now offers an Islamic index for tracking halal businesses. Networks are growing among the religious scholars who sit on the banks’ regulatory boards. The Sharia-compliant…
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…ews enough to know about the Bud Light freak-out—and he feels compelled to participate in both. Second, he’s an insurrection supporter who feels so untouchable that he’s happy to show it for all the world to see, to cast out all what was left of any pretense. He knows he’s safe. And he’s probably right. At this point, the question seems to be not so much “which insurrectionist flags has Alito flown?” but, as Jay Willis has pointed out on Twitter,…
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