Religion Dispatches
…round the block…” I love that idea. Well, in my case, I’ve been around the world. I’ve been around enough times to know there is more at stake in supporting the rights of Muslim women than proving every single word of the Qur’an is acceptable to every single reader (especially in translation). But as I have also already stated, it is the Qur’an to which I owe my surrender to God and my feminism. So I will discuss some of the Qur’anic support for m…
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…w much funding for family planning and abortion services in the developing world comes from the developed world? That’s a hard question to answer, because it varies so much by country. Asian countries cover much more of their own costs than poorer countries in Africa, for example. And of course there are so many different funding sources—governments, foundations, NGOs, etc. But according to the Guttmacher Institute, donor agencies in developed cou…
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…os produced by cyber-advocates promising an age of intelligent agents who knew us, knew our regular contacts, knew our interests, and just made sure that things worked out in our best interests. Of course, I don’t know what to do with the mixed tech we see in Caprica, where the rich families have a robo-butler and the police are still using VHS tapes. Do our own contemporary police and security forces really store records on videotape or do they c…
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…unintended effect of blaming “the news” for the state of the world. It’s true that news and other media shape our attitudes, which in turn shape our realities. And it is true, as the character behind this scheme observes, that the more the media turns up the volume on our collective awfulness, the more the public appears to embrace it. But Tomorrowland never asks why this might be (except to posit a general unthematized, solipsistic nihilism infe…
Read More…The Hindustan Times reports that Sunil Babu Pant, “Nepal’s most prominent crusader for equal rights to sexual minorities,” has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Pant founded the Blue Diamond Society, a pro-LGBT group that “is responsible for the 2007 Supreme Court ruling which directed Nepal government to grant equal status to sexual minorities.” According to Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), gay rights activists Igor Kochetkov from Ru…
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…icularly alert to in this election cycle. I think something that we’re really going to struggle with in this election is, how do you maintain a consistent political front—one that doesn’t just constitute a new politics of hatred of the other side—while at the same time having a strident critique of the politics of hatred? Also on The Cubit: Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life…
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…iberation. A first step TGL on its own, sadly, is unlikely to inspire. The new ‘New Age’ The roots of Goop lie in utopian dreams of other ways of being; the same set of impulses that drove the idea of universal human rights, jobs for all, communes, racially-integrated worlds, and both spiritual and this-worldly democracy. During the 60s and 70s, the intertwined movements for Black power, gay liberation and women’s liberation rose to prominence, ga…
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…agents for preventing his “passage from the lands of the polytheists.” The New York Times reported that in recent months “he dropped out of school and stopped attending mosque.” Given these statements, it would seem that Mohamud is a disaffected youth who had withdrawn from his family and local community well before the tree lighting ceremony. Our Media, Ourselves Ironically, while Mohamud lamented how unrepresented he was by American Muslims and…
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…one individual, and the overall style of leadership. It should be easy in New York City to create a visibly diverse group of Muslim supporters that represents the richness of our community, and who can put forward a clearly articulated vision. A combination of Muslims from different interpretations, like the interfaith advisory board the organizers envision, could protect the center from ideologues. I am not the only one raising concerns about th…
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…o serve in the army? That’s all I care about.” Joseph Mattera of Brooklyn, New York, the Convening Apostle of the U.S. Coalition of Apostolic Leaders, agrees with at least one part of Sheets’ teaching about the sons of God. He wrote a blog post in 2018 which, he said, “is based on notes I took from a teaching conducted by Dutch Sheets, who did a superb job of simplifying this message about the Kingdom of God.” Like Sheets, Mattera emphasized that…
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