Religion Dispatches
…ndrick’s lyrics reflect existential questions authors like Kelly Brown Douglas and I have been wrestling with post-Trayvon. Also, I live on the Westside of Chicago where my neighbors are well acquainted with the visceral reality Kendrick’s lyrics speak to. I suppose what follows is a review. But more specifically I am going to be interacting with Kendrick’s UU as a prophetic text of lamentation—it is a text which, like all texts of lament, reveals…
Read More…that they are so personally strange as to make their ministries almost unclassifiable. Is this the religious right? It’s not clear that even those who appreciate the label would want this guy. Although tired of “being smeared” and “defamed” on the internet by “gay apologists,” as he puts it, Lively, who is a lawyer, has decided not to sue. Instead he is embarking on a campaign “to give them a taste of their own medicine and expose the SPLC as the…
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…sformation” of the Catholic Church that is under way, “a decisive shift in numbers towards the Global South—to Asia, Africa and Latin America.” A century ago, he says, two-thirds of the world’s Catholics were in Europe, but by the middle of this century that number will fall “to perhaps a sixth.” Geography is not destiny, but it is only natural that prelates from one part of the world will tend to speak for the traditions with which they are most…
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…n bed on Sunday morning, reading the news about the Orlando shooting on my phone. In the wake of the tragedy, I have found myself mostly at a loss for words, stuttering between anger and sadness. I can not fully describe what I was feeling and thinking that morning as I was getting ready to head over to the LA Pride parade—even as news came in of an arrest in Santa Monica, earlier in the day, of a heavily armed man who was supposedly en route to t…
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…s beliefs. Nonetheless, spooked by the specter of a Catholic electoral backlash and Dolan’s foot-stomping at the White House, the Obama administration backed down and gave church-adjacent entities like Catholic hospitals and universities a special “accommodation” to the law. Under that accommodation, hospitals and universities merely had to inform the Department of Health and Human Services, via a form, that they did not wish to provide contracept…
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…u stand, they’re right, or not.” Maybe it is time to get the muftis on the phone after all. In the United States, at least, religious leaders and politicians have deferred some of society’s most pressing ethical concerns to the wisdom of the market. Calls that the “end of history” lies with neoliberal capitalism are being heard as far as the People’s Republic of China. Not without reason, the 20th century’s question of why free markets has been re…
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…d on Arafat in gratitude to Allah for having been her sister and for those last four years of her life which we shared so intimately like we never got a chance to before. By the time my sister was born I was already living away from my family for academic purposes and never really had a chance to bond as sisters until about five years. I am grateful for the gift of closeness that Allah gave us for her last days. My first year in California she spe…
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…urge of pickpockets besieging Mom & Pop stores. But who knows? Some people phone a friend to unload about their annoying neighbor, so maybe Mrs. Alito’s way of coping with neighborhood strife is to hoist a flag flown by insurrectionists. Could it be true? Yes. But it is incredibly unlikely—just as unlikely as misogynist-in-chief Sam Alito allowing his wife to decide which flag is flown for days at his house, openly supporting the insurrection. The…
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…years, Cooper’s been the insecure and dowdy second fiddle, working as the phone operator for suave CIA superagent Bradley Fine (Jude Law), guiding him past every danger even as he is oblivious to her obvious affections. You and I know there’s no way roles aren’t eventually going to be reversed. Because the world is changing, and because we watched the trailer. (It popped up before 50 Shades of Grey, aka “Shari’ah in the Bedroom.”) When Fine is ki…
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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