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An Immigrant’s Tale: The Pull of the Homeland

By Shabana Mir

…not-religion so very clearly and abruptly. We didn’t have to change in the phone booth, as it were, into the non-religious as we transitioned abruptly from ritual to rat race. It was not so very problematic for one to bleed over into the other. And during Ramadan, we grew up to expect lighter workloads. Migrant workers in certain Gulf countries learned to expect total lack of productivity and sometimes a complete absence of office workers during R…

The Wounded People of God

By Anthea Butler

…holic Church, I’ve been having some interesting conversations by email and phone with Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Some people have emailed me to say “right on.” Others, like some of my relatives, are just hurt, scared, and wondering if they can trust anything about their local priest, diocese, or bishop. I’ve received invitations to come and join the Episcopal Church (are you listening, Father Balmer?) but I am not quite “there” yet. Yet th…

Making ‘The Link’: AIPAC’s New Crises

By Matthew Duss

…veness, AIPAC successfully helped advance far-reaching economic and energy sanctions bills through both the House and Senate. In an attempt to move the sanctions bills through reconciliation and onto the president’s desk, earlier this month AIPAC sent a letter to every member of Congress demanding that the US government “impose crippling new sanctions on Iran,” including “provisions barring federal contracts to companies which are investing in Ira…

The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

By Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce

…ving into Clinton’s religious history, we studied her relationships with a number of spiritual mentors, including Tikkun’s Michael Lerner, who was soon replaced by “sacred psychologist” Jean Houston, who famously helped the First Lady get in touch with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, after Mother Teresa died, Clinton invoked the spirit of the nun as her guiding light so religiously that one might be excused for wondering whether she meant i…

Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

By Chip Berlet

…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…

‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

By Matt Recla

…show or a tape of that segment know exactly what he said—that it would be cheaper to assassinate Chavez than to wage a costly war against him. But no matter how you slice this baloney, God makes it pretty clear that vengeance is his business and not ours. (See Romans 12:19–21). In a few brief moments, Robertson managed to flush over two thousand years of Judeo-Christian teachings down the toilet. As I witnessed that notorious segment on The 700 C…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ces like Tehran, or Athens, or Beijing, that are armed and enabled by cell phone technology and the almost instantaneous circulation of striking images of authoritarian crackdown, impossible to contain or control. There is an old philosophical quandary posed as follows: can a fish imagine water? Similarly, Religion Dispatches exists within the very medium that it is simultaneously attempting to theorize. It is as global as the instruments it use…

Battling for the Soul of the Democratic Party

By Sarah Posner

…ca are (and, moreover, in the wake of Obama’s election, who will get their phone calls returned from the White House) certain names keep cropping up. Pastor Rick Warren, who sees no daylight between his views and James Dobson’s, but who, according to Sullivan’s book, former-DNC-chair Terry McAuliffe blasphemously didn’t know; Jim Wallis, best-selling author and activist who lambasts the religious right for its petty intolerance and the left for “n…

As a Queer Catholic Woman I Had High Hopes Before the 2023 Catholic Synod on Synodality

By Emma Cieslik

…or in 2023 that “people with homosexual tendencies are children of God,” a number of LGBTQ Catholics and advocates, myself included, got excited for a day or two—maybe even called our parents (if the Church hasn’t driven a wedge between them and us). But then the news cycle passes and, with each expression of anti-LGBTQ Catholic doctrine on diocesan and global levels, these small victories are tarnished with sadness and frustration. This is not to…

A Color-Blind America? Don’t Fall For The Okey-Doke

By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

…n there was the energy, the unmistakable nervous energy of hundreds of thousands of people gathering for one common purpose. We all knew that we were on the brink of something, but we did not know exactly what. Win or lose, there was so much love, peace, and general enthusiasm—like what I’d heard about Woodstock (less the partial nudity and drugs). This was by all accounts—both classic and contemporary—a religious experience. As an ethnographer, h…