Religion Dispatches
…ty of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept La…
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…y is that it is not limited to religiopolitical violence. Lankford cites a number of American suicide terrorists that exhibited “classic suicidal traits.” Like Joseph Stack, a divorced software engineer with tax problems. In 2010, Stack crashed his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; “There isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken [with me],” Stack wrote in the…
Read More…help find the missing airliner by using the power of remote viewing, a form of ESP….
Read More…at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and attempted to locate Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 using a magical ritual that combined Islamic elements with shamanic practices. On Thursday Ibrahim Mat Zin, also known as Rajah Bomoh Sedunia Nujum, delivered a press conference (in which he demonstrated a squint that bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat Robertson.) He initially stated that he had been invited to perform his ritual by one of Malaysia’s “…
Read More…dicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000. “Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory,” said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition. Mexico: Supreme Court embraces marriage, Church and some political officials resist As we have been reporting, the marriage equality movement has been movemen…
Read More…e entered one of the world’s most famous (former) mosques, I picked up an “official” pamphlet for tourists, which told visitors that the magnificent structure they were about to see dated back to “the Islamic interruption.” What a nice form of denial. Having studied medieval Spain in preparation for our trip, I found uncomfortable echoes with Serbian propaganda. Spain expelled its Jewish population in 1492 followed by Muslims, though ethnically…
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…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…
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…ate, an ancient institution revived by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied th…
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…. On the one hand, this is the generation that began in historically large numbers to leave institutional religion behind and embrace the eclectic, episodic, “spiritual but not religious” life that Melinda Lundquist Denton and Richard Flory call “back-pocket” religion. And that, of course, is if they’re religious at all. Many no longer are, and are therefore in equally historic numbers flooding the agnostic, atheist, and “unaffiliated” (or religio…
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…s with President Obama and top US leaders that he is able to help American officials understand who they are dealing with in Tehran, and find a way to work together to stop Iran before it is too late. Rosenberg, the author of Epicenter: Why The Current Rumblings in the Middle East Will Change Your Future, recently announced that he will host the 2009 Epicenter Conference. The confab will “examine several rising global geopolitical and economic cri…
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