Religion Dispatches
…on the heels of the birth of my second grandson. One minute we were on the phone and I was describing the birth event and sharing photos on Facebook. The next day, she went to bed, coughed once, and then breathed no more. She was 44. I thought about her when I read in the Qur’an 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…
Read More…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
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…eir microwave, not to bring their toaster oven and not to bring their cell phone. It was almost funny. Following that announcement from the now infamous loud “speaker,” he said that fajr prayer would be at 5:40. I should have thought more clearly about this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer time schedules: my iphone has one from the Ipray app; and I printed one off line from Islamicity; then collected one from my favorite mosque, wh…
Read More…itual practice and the option to pray there brings me joy and comfort. I reflect back to the height of the weekend when guests and locals overflowed in the mosque, even spilling out to a tent set in the yard out front. Perhaps what I am feeling is a loss from all this company celebrating this time with the Queen. She has not yet departed after all, and we are still honored by her visit. Perhaps it is the deafening silence of being so removed from…
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…very restrictive—every medical facility could probably pass inspection.” KFL Legislative Director Kathy Ostrowski points out that the Kansas Health Department used other states’ licensure requirements as a guide, eventually following Arizona’s and Texas’ regulations most closely. A blog post on KFL’s web page, however, suggests that “most provisions in the new Kansas law were taken from the published standards of the National Abortion Federation….
Read More…entified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
Read More…be canvassing the state, in preparation for “a full-scale get-out-the-vote phone bank operation to make sure every last pro-freedom and pro-family voter goes to vote on behalf of our values.” So far, the right’s anti-union battleground in Wisconsin hasn’t been explicitly framed as a “pro-family” issue, but here’s Marx: Please join Tony Nasvik and join the fight with 100 plus FFC activists who will be going door-to-door encouraging the Badger State…
Read More…od? The only way to find that out is to just go there. What authors have influenced you? Merold Westphal, a theist and a professor at Fordham University, wrote a book titled Overcoming Onto-Theology that influenced me. I came to the point at the end of my pastoral career where the issue of ontology, or the “beingness” of God really didn’t matter much to me. I didn’t really care if God was a person per se—athough I’m very much interested in the soc…
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…gns of the water’s path: parked cars askew in the street, on the sidewalk; flooded basement after flooded basement; ribbons of detritus strewn in patterns that look like the banks of a rushing stream. As if it had been following the outlines of the map the flood stopped just short of Avenue B, not touching our Orange side of the street. * Zooming in, zooming out—calculating the odds. It gave me a desperately needed illusion of control in the face…
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…y, terribly unique, but there are universals. In a super white, super loud flash… or a DJ’s croon… or a telephone’s brrng brrng, when you become forever lonesome. Because you know the real secret. Anything can happen. Aliens could land. *** Among the outrages of living in a time of violence is that victims feel the need to rank their suffering. “What I suffered pales in comparison,” the Aurora victim who tramped over his dead girlfriend, who stil…
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