Religion Dispatches
…l these scenarios, the West always knows best. Indeed, the West may know best because the West can change. Islam, on the other hand, is frozen, stuck in what Dipesh Chakrabarty called the “waiting room of history.” This is not, by the way, an exclusively French dynamic—the simple and inaccurate binary of a dynamic West and a static Islam, mired in the seventh century or a “medieval mindset” is stunningly common. And equally inaccurate. Conclusi…
Read More…cided on the next best thing from then on: I would do what I thought would best enhance my experience of the hajj and I would stay away from the rest, opting for silence if somebody else’s culture got too close. The variance of different cultural Islams prevented the women in our tent from creating an immediate community for the days ahead. At one point, the group leader wanted to inform the men and women together about the rites of Mina, Arafat,…
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…Gerbert questioned authority. He experimented. To learn which of two rules best calculated the area of an equilateral triangle, he cut out square inches of parchment and measured the triangle with them. To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models and devised an equation. (A modern physicist who checked his result calls it ingenious, if labor-intensive.) Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and con…
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…That is a powerful lesson for all of us, religious or not. Faith is at its best when it helps people be better people, whether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human…
Read More…ime for the Mayor to show he’s still a man of the people. He is by far the best Mayor we’ve had on transportation because he takes the subway. Now it’s time for him to show he can be the best Mayor we’ve had for law enforcement, and recognize the daily ways in which communities are victimized by the police. Instead of letting the NYPD take advice from unnamed, unaccountable DHS contractors, partner with experts. NYC has no shortage of top-notch un…
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…worth exploring, and in a college full of pre-professional majors it is my best-selling general education course, so I will not apologize for trying to complicate the views of future business people, health care professionals and public school teachers.) I struggled, as I suppose most teachers did on that day, to figure out what I would say to my students—some of whom would be triumphant, others grieving, all of them sleep-deprived. In truth, I di…
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…Americans unfold. ** WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD** The FX series is easily the best drama on television right now, chock-o-block with meticulously well-developed characters, relational pathos and intrigue, and an endlessly compelling story arc that, in large part, revolves around Paige Jennings, a precocious tween who, on her own, starts going to church and becomes a born-again Christian, and her parents, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, who are deep un…
Read More…and over again. Imagine my thoughts about this reversed order, right? The best position for the man in hajj is behind the woman. It made sense that these guys would literally need to be instructed for such, because their normal way of thinking must be, me first. Yes, yes, our wives are equal, but we’re the standard bearers and she must follow our leads. But in the jostle, if the person is behind you, they are more likely to be separated by the cr…
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…e want to be loving, faithful to scripture and they are trying to do their best, so I can respect that and value where they’re coming from. When I was coming out to my dad a few years ago, as I recount in the book, he held strongly non-affirming beliefs. He did not instantly change his mind. It was a slow process. He was a good, decent, caring intelligent man before he changed his beliefs and he still is. I think that he’s now more able to faithfu…
Read More…work. 2) Follow Harris’s instructions There’s no need to wonder about the best way to critique Harris’s work: you can just follow the very clear instructions he gives. Harris’s explanations of the critiques he wants to see are a tad oblique, but he generally invites two methods of attack: a) Disprove the idea that morality is that which makes everyone the most happy. Luckily, Joesph Bingham has already done this for you. In the University of Chi…
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