Religion Dispatches
…ion Department will affirm my suggestion that we are no longer the world’s most mathematically-inclined nation. We’re a scratch-to-win nation. We’re a roll-the-dice people. And our god is that God: the one who makes water flow from the rock (Numbers 20:11); who surprises us all the time by blessing us in the least likely circumstances. Mr. President: You need to understand this. You need to work with this, but very, very carefully. Because, like i…
Read More…ganizations like AIPAC and the ADL to distance themselves from ECI. This last step should have been taken long ago. ECI, as critics point out, is no more a friend of Israel than it is a foe of Occupy Wall Street. Rather, it uses Israel (and now Occupy) as a pawn to score electoral points for Republicans. The whole organization is a ruse. It’s the Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry. (Oh, and incidentally: Eliot Spitzer?! Surely he was included…
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…you know, it’s been banned.” Finland: 800+ same-sex couples married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “conse…
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…an average of two priests each. The sacraments were still a major part of most Catholics’ lives: there were nearly 1 million baptisms and 350,000 Catholic marriages. The controversy over Humanae Vitae ten years earlier had largely subsided; most Catholics used birth control and most priests ignored the issue. The Catholic Church had tried valiantly over the previous decade to make abortion a major political issue for Catholics as it pressed the i…
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…ival, it is not really that at all. Burners are the culture, and among its most privileged members, with money and time to spend. Many of them hold down regular jobs in small businesses or corporate America: they are teachers and college students, massage therapists and social workers, lawyers and emergency room physicians. They staff what Burners have dubbed “the default world” and keep it running, even though they come to the desert to escape it…
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…ck was one of the more powerful and feared people in American society. The most famous moral reformer of the Gilded Age, Comstock was the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and a special agent for the US Post Office who mounted a nationwide crusade to suppress the circulation of anything he personally found to be morally reprehensible. He often claimed he was merely performing God’s will in an ongoing war against sin. Usin…
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…e things.” But publicity has been a mixed bag. Mr. Mushtaq said that while most of the feedback he received had been positive, he also got text messages calling him “an ugly, dirty Muslim” and a “terrorist.” He has also met fellow leather folk who think “that being Muslim is the antithesis of being progressive,” he said. Although he calls himself a Muslim (he studied Arabic and the Quran as a child), Mr. Mushtaq says his relationship to Islam toda…
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…14, 2016, when, after years of the “War on Terror,” one of North America’s most important international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation o…
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…for now I will not rest, I will not sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight, until I hear the end of this violation. And neither should you, for it is the abomination that brings desolation. The final reckoning will not register which airline company boasted the most freshly painted fleet or ranked last in customer satisfaction. But there are some sacred goods of such high ideal as we instead are called to satisfy, goods that are not to be consumed…
Read More…k a cup of tea with leaves still settled at the bottom. Once the liquid is mostly all drunk, the reader takes the leaves, swishes them around in the bottom of the cup, turns the cup upside down and “reads” the tracks and pattern stains left by the leaves. I remember only one thing she said, that I would make hajj in the next year or two. This year I made my intentions during the previous hajj season. As I have said, I committed to use my little bi…
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