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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…ued until nightfall. They continued until counselors and nuns in habits outnumbered wild-eyed parents. Then some guy came over and asked for identifying information about their children—jewelry, tattoos, dental records. Two women went outside and threw up. A man who was shot while watching the premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado this July remembers that he was sitting in the fifth row of the theater. When the theater filled with s…
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…Islam is in our world—Muslims are the world’s youngest religion (by age), number nearly one-fourth of humanity, and live all over the planet—what good do we imagine Islamophobia will do for America? Islamophobia claims to tell the truth about Islam, free of bigotry and political correctness, but it does no such thing. Its only real legacy is one of bad foreign policy choices, too many incidents of domestic discord, all kinds of missed opportuni…
Read More…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…
Read More…ter had DuBois been more experienced and the office given more stature. According to this thinking, clashes with Catholic groups, particularly the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act, could have been alleviated. But as yesterday’s statement from the USCCB on the latest proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services on religious exemptions and accommodations made cl…
Read More…ll use the term “mix tape”?) While she’s out and completely unreachable by phone, her dad, Ken, goes into the hospital with breathing difficulties and is admitted to intensive care. Taylor finally gets the message, is stricken with remorse and concern, prays for her dad’s healing, and resolves to be more responsible. My Dinner with Frankie: Mark and Cheryl Perry invited their teenage daughter Olivia’s friend Frankie over for dinner. Since Olivia h…
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…eet project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told me by phone, “because these stories have a real impact on people.” Telling stories grounded in real Arab-American history is the only way to reach understanding. And understanding is still sorely needed. One imagines what the Islamophobic activists who conjured the “Ground Zero Mosque” debacle a couple years back would do with the news of an Arab neighborhood in the shadow of the…
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…iminality. Toni Morrison talked about this in a different context but her words echo powerfully here: “Blackness and criminality are merged in the minds of most white Americans.” In forcing these uncomfortable questions on us, Professor Butler is saying that we must reckon with the legal, social, historical, and finally the religious, entanglements of Christianity with whiteness. So entwined has the racial imagination, the imaginary of whiteness,…
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…ekes are predators, whose primary purpose is to infect. Not surprisingly, hordes of zombies, unidentifiable masses, are the center of the film’s big budget effects. Zekes scale walls, cling onto jets, and take down helicopters. Yet the most compelling scenes of World War Z focus on the Lane family, who start the day eating pancakes together and get caught up in the outbreak. Karin Lane (Mirielle Enos) anxiously awaits word from her husband, Gerry…
Read More…eer put his hand on Monk’s shoulder and praised him, saying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wanted to remain anonymous. Sergeant Monk, to his credit, is willing to stand up.” Let’s read between the lines here: Monk is, quite literally, the best example of discrimination against Christians in the military that the Liberty Inst…
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