Religion Dispatches
…document entitled “What is The Truth about American Muslims? Questions and Answers,” co-authored by Dr. Charles Haynes of the Religious Freedom Education Project, Wajahat Ali, and myself. The idea has been in development for nine months, as Muslims came under more scrutiny, and after Islamophobic groups attempted to denigrate the tragedy of 9/11 for coarse political gains starting in 2010. The questions we formed were based on two basic criteria:…
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…in the right-wing evangelical milieu I inhabited as a middle-schooler and high-schooler, there was also the deliberate fomenting of wildly irrational hatred for Hillary Rodham Clinton, encompassing everything from, “She kept her maiden name in her name, that godless feminist witch!” to “She and Bill are murderers!” to “Don’t tell me it takes a village to raise my kids, you commie!” And then there was “Hillarycare.” More properly known as the prop…
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…’s start with Elvis. His Memphis girlfriend, June, received a copy for her high-school graduation in 1956, before regifting it to Elvis when he seemed sad one day. After that, The King carried it with him, in his glove compartment, on his nightstand, and when he went to Germany as a soldier. Reportedly it gave him comfort after his mother’s death. He would underline and annotate copies and give them away to friends. Sample annotation: “A singer ca…
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…uman rights element to anti-abortion activists, seeking to defend the right-to-life of the unborn. Much of this came from Catholics. As evangelicals and the Christian Right joined the cause in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was often more rhetorical focus on the immorality of abortion than the rights of the unborn. This reflected the politics of the “Moral Majority.” A rights-based stream within the pro-life movement persisted, however, and…
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…owever-many years to getting my degree in this stuff switched from the leap-of-faith category to eminently reasonable. Sure, maybe I’d end up a scholar. But I could also be a diplomat. Or the director of an NGO. Or a bartender. Or an astronaut. Fast-forward a few years—the AAR, 2010. Grad school hasn’t really panned out. (It wasn’t you, PhD, it was me.) By this point I’ve become a journalist, but still go to the conference to connect with friends…
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…“suggests that both Turkey and the Muslim world need to engage in some soul-searching when it comes to tolerance for their gay compatriots.” Aykol notes that “Turkey scores slightly better on measures of gay rights when compared with some nearby Christian-majority nations such as Russia, Armenia and Ukraine,” and that some LGBT singers, artists, and designers have been popular. But, he writes, “the traditional mainstream Islamic view on homosexual…
Read More…ess to the database if they were found in violation of the policy? What if high-volume submitters were randomly audited for documentation of direct ancestral ties to the names they submitted for baptism, on penalty of being denied access to the database, or worse? What if letters were read in LDS Sunday meetings stressing the importance of the no-baptize policies, or talks given at LDS meetings by ranking Church officials stressing respect for the…
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…that is at its core anti-materialist. I am also not one to embrace an anti-body, anti-aesthetic vision of the human that demonizes the body. And yet, as I understand it, Christianity teaches us to value relationships over objects and embrace a communal vision of the human community over individualism. This is fundamental, for example, to the Catholic Social tradition, where the common good is foundational, as is the dignity of the human person. A…
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…ne of those freshwater springs beneath the Manhattan asphalt. Kevin Dann’s new book, Enchanted New York: A Journey Along Broadway Though Manhattan’s Magical Past, looks to bring this idea to a wider audience. The book is a kind of travelogue of the city’s magical places and events, demonstrating that from the American Revolution to the Red Scare of the 1950s, “both witting and unwitting actors have engaged in magic, often with enormous historical…
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…shows up on searches much more clearly, and today we are all bound by “The Search.” How do you feel about the cover? As mentioned above, the first cover image the publishers sent to me was a scene from Gibson’s The Passion, and I was in utter despair about this. “It’s everything I didn’t want this book to be!” I pleaded. And Yoram Allon, the director of Wallflower Press and a very astute interpreter of religious film himself, realized this and…
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