Religion Dispatches
…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…
Read More…ughter Bella was hospitalized.) Organizers said they had distributed 1,800 tickets, and the pews in the church were nearly full, with several hundred, if not nearly a thousand people in attendance. Gingrich was the only candidate to appear; Staver, the “forum’s” moderator took pains to point out that they had invited the other candidates. Santorum and Ron Paul had commitments outside of Florida. Mitt Romney, the candidate Staver and other leaders…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…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 “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
Read More…in Florida and used to witness to people on the beach. Kumrits was born in Paraguay to missionary parents and once believed that if you weren’t washed in the blood of Christ, you were going to hell. The two 28-year-olds talk about who they once were like it was a long time and a different life, even though it was only two years ago. I met Kumrits and Jones at Orange Beach, Alabama, where they have been working as clean up workers. Two weeks earlie…
Read More…also putting up two gay candidates. She argued that Venezuela, along with Paraguay, Guyana, Suriname and Peru, has done little to extend equal rights to homosexuals. Venezuela’s National Assembly, controlled by the ruling Socialist Party, has not opened a debate on legislation proposed by gay activists that would legalise same-sex marriage… The Socialist Party has come under pressure from Evangelical Christians, who oppose gay marriage. They have…
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…an creature thrive in the streets of 21stcentury Tokyo, 19th century rural Paraguay, and Paleolithic southwest France? Do you understand human nature by finding fixed laws? Or do you grasp it by understanding the rules of humankind’s incredible un-fixedness? Shortly after finishing Barash’s book, I read a new essay by the photography critic Teju Cole. Reviewing photographer Steve McCurry’s new collection of photos of India, Cole makes a distinctio…
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