Religion Dispatches
…d on Arafat in gratitude to Allah for having been her sister and for those last four years of her life which we shared so intimately like we never got a chance to before. By the time my sister was born I was already living away from my family for academic purposes and never really had a chance to bond as sisters until about five years. I am grateful for the gift of closeness that Allah gave us for her last days. My first year in California she spe…
Read More…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
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…Last night they announced plans for the i’itikaf or spiritual retreat (the last ten days of Ramadan) and told the brothers (only) not to bring their microwave, not to bring their toaster oven and not to bring their cell phone. It was almost funny. Following that announcement from the now infamous loud “speaker,” he said that fajr prayer would be at 5:40. I should have thought more clearly about this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer…
Read More…anyway) had already set for the night. I will need to look for him where I last saw him, and when I last saw him: on this road toward the mosque, in the evening around tarawih time. I have my flashlight handy because once I past the community kitchen, the darkness is overwhelming. But I only need it for a short while. After that I am surrounded by holiday lights in multiple colors and configurations. They celebrate this month with these decoration…
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…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…
Read More…entified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
Read More…nti-marriage-equality campaign. High-ranking Church leaders even scheduled phone calls with individual members to make the ask in person. Did Church leaders solicit an individual contribution from you to the Yes on 8 campaign or any other anti-marriage-equality initiative? If so, how did you respond? How would you respond in such a situation? 2. Mormonism is an openly patriarchal religious culture—one of the most patriarchal modern cultures on th…
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…ncy created in December to tighten his control of the media. Kiselyov said last year that if gay people die in an accident, their hearts should be burned or buried so that they could not be transplanted. The Human Rights campaign released an animated video about the role American evangelical activists have played in promoting anti-gay policies in Russia. Dominican Republic: Religious resistance to gay ambassador We reported last week on the respon…
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…y. We assume someone’s listening. We live ready for conversation. If you blast out a message—whether it’s a DVD, a tweet, or a smoke signal—and you think that’s the end of it, you haven’t been paying attention for the past several years to how communication works these days. So, perhaps the Pope is right: you ought to be listening more. Likewise, it would take fairly rigorous monastic seclusion to have missed the memo on transparency as a virtue…
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…Cake If you have made it this far, then you can guess what comes next and last, because it is worst of all: the actual engagement with the Islamophobe. I offer you snippets from a conversation with a noted voice of the Islamophobic fringe, who I had the opportunity to engage—albeit on Twitter—some weeks ago. The topic was of course Islamophobia. After a long and meandering conversation, in which anything any reasonable person could say was twiste…
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