Religion Dispatches
…one can keep away. And my Zappos shoes person recounted almost missing a plane, landing without her bags, but how she and her husband still managed to get there, because “once Allah invites you, then no one and nothing will keep you away.” So I tried to be optimistic. It didn’t help that my daughter accused me of the contrary. Or rather, she asked: aren’t you ever optimistic? I told her about waiting for the visa and how NOT being optimistic was…
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…a for spiritual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun burs…
Read More…lieved Obama is a Muslim and an “illegal alien.” Indeed, suspicion about Islam ran high here. State Senator Alan Hays received probably the most boisterous standing ovation of the day when he was introduced as the sponsor of a bill that would ban the use of “foreign” (i.e., sharia) law. Florida religious right leaders seem to see this moment, even if Gingrich or Santorum can’t catch Romney, to build a Christian get-out-the-vote drive for the gener…
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…rights. Steve Hill The evangelist behind the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, Fla., Steve Hill died at 60. Hill’s testimony was that he had been saved from drug addiction at 21 and a merciful judge sent him to David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge instead of prison. He became a missionary with the Assemblies of God in the 1980s and then a traveling evangelist in the 1990s. Hill preached at the Brownsville Assembly of God church on Father’s Day 1995, a…
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…e,” The Washington Post reports. “Because, 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…
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…uty executive director of OutRight Action International, said that the backlash largely resulted from the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States. She claimed that the “social media attention . . . is part of what got people riled up.” But another factor is the growing influence of hard-line groups like the Islamic Defenders Front (IDF) and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the latter of which claims over 40 million members. Nahdlatul Ulama, an…
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…ing, she would just go back to her point and ignore mine,” Chassé told me. Later on, after we’d spoken, Chassé felt manipulated, like they’d tried to indoctrinate her. Captains RC and Miranda are a young, personable couple with the unenviable job of administering an impressive array of community outreach and social service activities, from Sunday school to a thrift store, soup kitchen, and rent and utility assistance programs. In the midst of the…
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…Rock Desert is dominated by a dry lake bed called the playa—an absolutely flat and desolate expanse of cracked alkali clay—and the experience of camping there can be extreme. At the center of the Black Rock City is the Burning Man icon itself: a towering wooden sculpture that is lit with multicolored shafts of neon and ultimately filled with fireworks and other incendiaries that detonate at the festival’s climax. Even more intriguing is the incre…
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…overwhelmingly South Asian, especially in Dubai—they form the service and labor class, but many South Asians are wealthy professionals and businesspersons. Dubai and the UAE have historically been more a part of the Indian Ocean economy than the Arab world, which is barely a coherent economic concept (countries like Turkey belong as much to Eastern Europe as the Middle East; the Gulf more to India and East Asia than to Arab and Berber North Afric…
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…rk Times op-ed last summer that what makes the Tea Party movement so unpopular to a large segment of the population is the conservative impulse to mix religion and politics. Americans, they suggest, oppose the mingling of the two. And yet Campbell and Putnam’s own data show that the majority of Americans consider themselves religious. Perhaps what many actually oppose is the way certain types of evangelicals mix their religion and politics. R. R….
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