Religion Dispatches
…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…
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…xious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very least, I thought I had a responsibility to the Muslim students on campus. (Then again, I really had no idea what to do. I just thought I had to do something, anything, to help.) Walking into our prayer space, which was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a frien…
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…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
Read More…mong his five accomplishments, “Stopped so-called ‘Satanists’ from mocking City Hall traditions with a ‘prayer.’” TST demanded the city pay their court costs and sought an injunction ensuring prayer invocations are either halted or open to all religions. In Missouri, TST filed a new federal lawsuit on behalf of a pregnant woman named “Judy Doe.” Their federal case on behalf of Mary Doe (which was separate from their state case) had been thrown out…
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…ted for assault. It was only after the highest Christian authorites in the city intervened that the Israeli government rescinded its order that the Armenian seminarians be deported from the country. While Jewish-Christian relations in the city surely are in need of some repair, these problems seem small in the face of deteriorating Jewish-Muslim relations. But while Jewish-Muslim tensions dominate the headlines, most Israeli liberals feel that the…
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…new policy regarding who can give prayer invocations. Why do you think the city changed its mind? In Scottsdale, TST claims that it was disparaged as a religion and that that was ultimately what caused the group to be uninvited, though they had originally been placed on the list as any other group. The city claims that it was our lack of ties to the community that led to the removal. Can you explain the argument that Scottsdale’s actions amount to…
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…ed chicanery; it was terrifying, and all too human. The wolves outside the city walls threaten the life of the city. The wolves hidden among us may threaten the city even more. These are powerful mythic tropes, both the Greek and Roman ones. But the werewolf appears to be an Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, rather than a Greco-Roman, myth. And what is most striking about these “werewolves” is that they are even more wolf-like than the wolves are. More pr…
Read More…u believe – of anti-marriage-equality Catholics and evangelicals to Mexico City, the culmination of weeks of protest organized by the National Front for the Family. Days before, the Supreme Court ruled that adoption by same-sex couples should be considered, like other adoptions, according to the best interest of the child. In preparation for Saturday’s anti-marriage-equality march, Mexico City officials lit the Angel of Independence monument in ra…
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…Jones was quoted using language reminiscent of Franklin: We’re a New York City institution. And we have a New York City-sized problem. But fortunately we also have a New York City-sized answer. God is calling us to have another 100 years, and the air rights are the answer to that call. Yes, indeed, a call is being answered. But which God has given the call? What’s happening at Union is a microcosm of a broader reality: poor people of color being…
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