Religion Dispatches
…this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer time schedules: my iphone has one from the Ipray app; and I printed one off line from Islamicity; then collected one from my favorite mosque, when I went there for the tarawih prayer the night proceeding the first day of fasting. None of them have the same time on it. I therefore create a buffer to offset any slight disagreement a few minutes in the morning and a few at sunset. The rest I leav…
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…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. #5 : Three Ways to American Beauty by Aaron K. Kerr At the height of secular modernity, when Catholics were openi…
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…“nones”—the unaligned, agnostics, and atheists—are at 15%, up from 8.2% in 1990 and 14.1% in 2001. Nothing like the previous decade’s change, but not too slouchy. The lion’s share of the headlines declared that religion is losing its grip on Americans. Some mourned, some celebrated, and many were surprised. Wasn’t this, after all, the decade of the values-voter and a new Great Awakening? Perhaps it no coincidence that the pair who produced this s…
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…and tempers taking turns providing spiritual support, and mainly over the phone. Because Goodstein’s piece was essentially unsourced, some caution is in order as to even believing that Obama accepts rotating support and counsel from Jim Wallis, Joel Hunter, Otis Moss Jr., Kirbyjon Caldwell, and T.D. Jakes. This crew struck me as a little too Dream Teamy in respect to the political and cultural stances and demographic constituencies of the disting…
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…of Southern Methodist University. She was ordained as a Methodist Elder in 1979 and served as pastor of various churches. In 1986, the Rev. Carcaño was the first Hispanic woman named a District Superintendent in the Methodist Church. She served in West Texas, New Mexico, and Portland, Oregon, where her ministry always focused on the marginalized. In 1992, she organized the Southern Albuquerque Cooperative Ministry, an ecumenical venture wit…
Read More…elf for the backlash created by offensive resolutions. I’ve done this since 1997 when I was awakened by a phone call from a Lutheran friend that began, “What’s with you Southern Baptists and Mickey Mouse?” I was unaware that the messengers voted on a resolution to boycott Disney because of its policies toward homosexuals. One resolution approved by the messengers this year that may not be so widely publicized is a resolution “On Affirming the Use…
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…urge of pickpockets besieging Mom & Pop stores. But who knows? Some people phone a friend to unload about their annoying neighbor, so maybe Mrs. Alito’s way of coping with neighborhood strife is to hoist a flag flown by insurrectionists. Could it be true? Yes. But it is incredibly unlikely—just as unlikely as misogynist-in-chief Sam Alito allowing his wife to decide which flag is flown for days at his house, openly supporting the insurrection. The…
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Early Sunday morning I woke up, my phone abuzz with news. Reading about the shooting in Orlando, worry and fright overcame me. Still in a semi-wake, semi-sleep, semi-dream state, I thought it was Charleston all over again. Emanuel AME redux. My partner saw my face and asked what had happened. We turned on the television to learn that a man named Omar Mateen had entered a popular gay nightclub on its “Latin Night.” Using an AR-15 assault rifle and…
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…ple born between about 1961 and 1981) and Baby Boomers (people born between 1946 and about 1959). According to Schwadel’s examination of data from the General Social Survey, adults raised by Baby Boomer parents are more likely to have no religious affiliation—to be religious “Nones,” in current social research parlance. The unaffiliated religious status of Gen-Xers can be attributed to high rates of Boomers disaffiliation in the 1960s that was pas…
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…mmunities of Violence. I was working on a massacre of Jews that happened in 1321. All the documents talked about this massacre, but none of them gave any numbers. I came to the conclusion that this probably was not a big massacre. It happened in a tiny town in the middle of the mountains. They probably were talking about it as a massacre in order to justify the fines on the populace. You might say it’s like people talking about anti-Semitism in or…
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