Religion Dispatches
…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…
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…at even though she does not actively proselytize, she has had a surprising number of conversations about her faith during her time at Bonnaroo. “The people here are trying to fill themselves up with something.” When she tells that she believes “there is a spiritual war going on right now,” we ask her which side Bonnaroo is on. Neither, she says. As the yoga proceeds behind us, she says that the experiences people have at Bonnaroo can be a step in…
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…gainst single-issue voting. For example, Bishop J. Terry Steib of Memphis, Tennessee, claimed that a well-formed conscience could include voting for candidates “who may not support the Church’s position in every case” (read: Senator Obama). Similarly, Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Bishop-President of Pax Christi, a US Catholic peace group, urged talking about life issues, “beginning with abortion but including a…
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…ine and Colorado, but gained some traction in committees of both houses in Tennessee before being added to the Project Blitz playbook. Baker said he was originally concerned about the popular-but-sometimes-controversial Drag Queen Story Hour in libraries and bookstores around the country. Drag Queen Story Hour describes its events simply as “drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores… [where] kids are able to see…
Read More…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…
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…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…
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…damentally post-racist country, the racists “are just a few idiots,” not a number tallied in the millions. In “conservatism,” the intellectual legacy of the Confederacy has been normalized and an entire population of Negrophobes is absorbed into society and allowed space to push their anti-Black agenda everywhere from the Senate floor to bank cubicles. It’s been said that politics is the continuation of war by other means. After the surrender at A…
Read More…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
Read More…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…
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…. My father always folded over one of the small amounts—not enough to seem cheap, since he was a doctor and a “respected member of the community” (as my mother described him), but certainly not the amount some of his friends and colleagues donated. I didn’t understand it then, but I think my father—born of Lithuanian immigrants, child of the Great Depression, a no-nonsense person who disdained ideologies of all types and never had a bad word to sa…
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