Religion Dispatches
…use I was so anxious about the hajj that I could not sleep. As it was, bus number one had not yet departed and I was ordered to get on it. Good thing too, because bus number two did not leave for another eight hours! Anyway, eventually we are all there in the camp and there is only one night before we proceed to Arafat. Wuquf Arafat, standing on the plains of Mt. Arafat is the hajj, the penultimate event, which only happens once a year on the nint…
Read More…ll the same. The clinic nurse I was shadowing that day attributed the high number, at least in part, to truck drivers sitting in their cabs in the gravel lot down the road waiting to clear customs. If we extrapolate that number out to the village as a whole and assume that over one-third of the women in this small town in rural Zambia are HIV-positive, the enormity of the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa becomes clearer. What intricate, invisibl…
Read More
…reach programs and social support systems offered by churches? There are a number of great programs out there like Recovering from Religion, the Secular Therapist Project, Secular Organizations for Sobriety, and Grief Beyond Belief that offer support services to those in need. Through organizations like the Foundation Beyond Belief we can be active in helping others. Through these organizations, we have a good starting point to build a foundation…
Read More
…n will help parents to keep their children faithful. Given the statistical number of Nones among Millennials and Gen X and the seemingly unpreventable increase in those numbers, these children, like Emily, or the children of many homeschooling parents, will eventually encounter peers who are not religiously affiliated. Given the way technology works, they will also inevitably find a way to expose themselves to popular culture. And the question rem…
Read More
…year’s All-Star game, one team wore Kobe’s number 24, while the other wore number 2, Gianna’s uniform number. The MVP award, given this year to Los Angeles Clippers’ star forward Kawhi Leonard, was renamed permanently for Kobe Bryant. Pregame and half-time shows centered on Kobe, his family, and his impact on the sport of basketball and society. The collective grief and bereavement displayed by fans and players alike not only demonstrate the power…
Read More…eard this evening was rolled out here, in the first five minutes, as point number two. And Senator McCain repeated it all evening long, lest we miss it. He now proposes a state-sponsored re-definition of the current housing market, such that the federal government will buy up an enormous number of imminent foreclosures (how?), mandate a new evaluation of the real value of these homes (how?), then enable homeowners to re-negotiate their current mor…
Read More
…stake tensions for incompatibilities or inherent opposition. I know a fair number of African Americans, Hispanics, and Muslims who once voted Republican. They no longer do—not because they disagree with the Republican Party, but because they feel it has no room for them. It seems opposed to their presence in America. A good number in the Muslim-majority world feel the same way about the place of Islam in the world: there is no room for it. It isn’…
Read More
These days, when ever you say you are Muslim by choice, you get people asking about your conversion. Mostly they want to know why. This curiosity comes equally from those who are already Muslim and those who are not. I used to tell the same basic steps—although I hardly think my own individual door lights up any bulbs of excitement. Maybe because no lightbulbs went off for me either. I was a seeker. I was raised in a loving Christian environment…
Read More
…position as “USA Country Representative” and has spoken on IFTCC stages a number of times. In many ways Haynes embodies the US conversion network presence at the Warsaw conference. In addition to her affiliations noted above, she wrote a letter to the UN that was published by Family Watch International; she was interviewed by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins; and, on behalf of the IFTCC, she drafted a declaration against conversion…
Read More
…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…
Read More