Religion Dispatches
…The 99. The 99 is the brainchild of Naif al-Mutawa, and he recently gave a talk at TED about the origin of the idea. The gist of it is that he was inspired by the positive values imparted by the heroes of Marvel and DC comics. He wanted to create a more multicultural team of heroes who would extend those positive messages to people outside of the U.S., and expose American audiences to a more culturally diverse team of heroes. So here is a New York…
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…family didn’t own slaves, you certainly weren’t enslaved, why are we still talking about this? To have something as personal and interior and intimate as a genetic marker suggests this historical legacy in your very being. Even if people know it to be true, through oral history or other ways, it really shines a light on it in a different sort of way. It allows people in the present, using a very high-tech means, to say something about the past, an…
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…ove. A group leader emphasizes that through YMA you can go out to bars and talk about God, but in casual conversation others downplay religion, stressing that members are “normal” and not “Bible-thumping” Catholics. Statements like these reflect the journeys many have taken. Afterward, three women tell me they were raised Catholic but hadn’t been involved in the church for some time, while another young man tells me he’s interested in spirituality…
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…, and reasonable people. All of them began the same way, “I don’t normally talk about these things, but you’re not going to believe what happened to me once…” What’s the most important take-home message for readers? I think my experiences led me to a deeper appreciation of the living and the dead. None of us knows for sure what happens to us after we die, but there are living people around us, all around us, who feel things—joy and hurt, happiness…
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…th her determination to “walk the walk” of her religious values, not just “talk the talk,” as she put it to me when I met her and Schenck, along with the film’s producer and director, Abigail Disney, in Washington this week. “We have replaced God with our guns as the protector,” McBath tells Schenck in the film. The meeting in the garden, Schenck told me, “has a metaphorical meaning to it. It was in the garden that Jesus decided to submit to the w…
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…e-sex parenting and its implications for child development.” Sullins’ main talk enlisted countless slides with numbers, tables, and colored graphs in an effort to question the well established fact that, in addition to scant data supporting even a modest success rate, treatments aiming to suppress sexual orientation or gender expression can cause serious damage, or even be deadly. His own research, however, has essentially been deemed junk science…
Read More…een used to wedge exclusivist ideology, religion and politics. When people talk of the Muslim ummah today, it is romantic. We are far too diverse for what they mean, which often includes a single interpretation of things which are much too complex. One of the passages I was reading refers to the ummah of the Book. I found that interesting. Interesting because I had to think what it meant. Is it like the “people of the book” in the Qur’an, thereby…
Read More…spell from a Wiccan. $8.95 and free shipping. Julia Roberts will no longer talk about religion. Thank you. Roberts said she remembered her mother’s wise words: “You’re an actor, act. Don’ at talk about politics or religion.” Roberts apparently converted to Hinduism during the shooting of her latest film, Eat, Pray, Love. Catholic Church leaders have given the film a thumbs down because Roberts’ character doesn’t pray while in Rome—she merely eats….
Read More…ied to script a Mormon “grassroots” relationship to the Yes on 8 campaign, talking themselves and the members of their insular world into the legitimacy of these arrangements, it was naive and foolish to think that such a campaign could be conducted without significant consequences. One of these consequences is that the Church has now branded itself as the leading anti-gay-rights religion in the country. That’s an expensive bit of turf to hold in…
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…apart from removing unnecessary commas they let me be incredibly honest in talking about their lives and their fights for justice, even when we had to talk about the Vatican handing down warnings and threats in the case of Sister Jeannine Gramick or about the rape and torture that Sister Dianna Mae endured at the hands of her captors in Guatemala. They didn’t have to share so many things with me and I feel honored that they trusted me enough as a…
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