Religion Dispatches
…th century forward, the festivals allow participants to suspend their everyday lives to engage in something that is both theatrical and ecstatic. Events like Burning Man, an eight-day annual event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, have attracted particular scholarly attention for the way that they allow participants to create impromptu communities, to be arbiters of their own rules, and to create thick meaning for themselves through social inter…
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…they can only do it with the faith of their supporters at home. Maybe someday nonviolence will be the way of the world, but for today it remains an invisible kingdom in the sky. By his history-making presence and his silver-tongued charisma, Obama serves to remind us that a nation can change according to the hearts of its people. He reinvigorates the old, two-faced idea that America might be a nation under God—not my God or your God, but a God wo…
Read More…lot to ask of regular people to tune in and maintain that level of outrage day after day, week after week, with little to show for it but a Glenn Beck-endorsed souvenir poster of the US Constitution with a blank where they could pretend to become the hallowed document’s fortieth signer. And it got even worse for Beck fans last spring and summer when in a desperate quest for content Beck ventured into the world of religion, picking on Jim Wallis, c…
Read More…ran after the list was published… “Hate speech in Armenia is rising day by day,” Hovsepyan told NNN. “The homophobic media has the support of government officials and promotes aggression and hate toward LGBT people.” Vatican: Pope Francis meets with previously shunned liberal bishop; Vatican nixes trans godparent Jacques Gaillot, a French bishop who was demoted by Pope John Paul II for his liberal views – he has been nicknamed “the Red Cleric” — m…
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…orning, Barber and other clergy gathered for a press conference before the day’s teach-in, which was attended by about 100 local activists. In the sanctuary of National City Christian Church, still decorated for Christmas, Barber criticized conservative white evangelicals who insist that the moral issues of the day are standing against LGBT people and women’s access to reproductive health care, saying that their priorities are “so far from biblica…
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…e problems with its reductive history and arguments. But mainstream Latter-day Saints were simply aghast. The Church felt so threatened by the book’s mass appeal that they issued three statements that meticulously challenged both specific historical facts as well as its general thesis. A legion of volunteer apologists penned tedious responses. Cultural acceptance seemed, once again, to be fleeting. A crucial part of Krakauer’s tale is exposing the…
Read More…ly edit. This is not as easy as it may seem, this blogging for one hundred days— Ramadan through my first hajj. Meanwhile I AM actually fasting; and actually reading Qur’an everyday; I am actually attending tarawih regularly, and trying to have a family life too. Well, you get the drift. I’m sure if I had a job, it would be impossible to do this blog. Into my first week another Facebook friend decided he like this idea so much that he was going to…
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…and women, to name a few. On November 9th, two such friends of mine took a day off from their jobs so that they could cry all day. They were literally worried sick. One described the previous night as “the longest panic attack I’ve ever had.” These feelings are not unwarranted, and the masses of concerned citizens acting upon them and protesting Trump should not met with cynicism or ridicule for their “late” arrival to activism. As writer Shaun Ki…
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…r taking stock of one’s privilege and identifying the ways it functions in day-to-day life, intersectionality challenges us to find ways to leverage that privilege in the pursuit of greater social justice and not, as Sullivan seems to believe, to simply feel badly about it or to self flagellate. For a gainfully employed, cisgender white gay man like Sullivan, that might mean taking the time to listen to, for instance, Black trans women who continu…
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…jority of the communities have far fewer members than they had in their heyday in the 1960s. (The median age for members is now over 70; only several hundred sisters are in their 30s.) The concern for numbers is really, as subsequent materials from the investigators have shown, an entrée to looking at the lives, beliefs, and practices of women who strive to live coherently, melding their religious convictions with the needs of the world. Whether t…
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