Religion Dispatches
…how “every soul will have its taste of death.” So gentle was her moment of passing, and yet so painful has been these few months without her here to enjoy this Ramadan to share my blog, even; as the only one of my family even interested or capable of appreciating things like Facebook or Twitter and blogging I think about gratitude or shukr then with a new resound. I think about those gifts from Allah that we do not reflect upon. Think about it, ho…
Read More…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
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…and then subsequently read the book, I had a long discussion with a Jewish participant. We were not comfortable with our perception that the Christian paradigm of forgiveness did not seem to require any expiation. We were doubtful that forgiveness and reconciliation could occur just on the part of some benevolence from the one(s) offended. We were not sure that you could just “overcome them with our capacity to forgive.” So I listened to her, disc…
Read More…ality proponents within one vote of a majority—and apparently stirred some panic among anti-equality activists who have up until now been confident of victory. Today, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) urgently called on its supporters to get more phone calls into Senate offices. NOM is urging Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos to use his power to keep marriage from coming to the floor for a vote. Meanwhile, Archbishop Timothy Dolan is g…
Read More…ad through. To be merciful with our aging is like Allah’s mercy with those parents: it’s a part of the Divine nature and I am grateful. Finally, and of course unique for this year, I learned that it is possible to blog your way through Ramadan, sharing many ideas along the way, and yet still keep some things between you and Allah alone. The idea to do this one hundred-day blog came to me on my recent return from Indonesia. While there, my friends…
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…left the denomination to help swing the vote. But advocates downplay the impact of their departure, since most reports estimate that only 100 of the denomination’s 11,000 congregations have been lost. “I don’t buy it,” says Dykers-Koenig. “Maybe in a couple of presbyteries [it made a difference].” Rev. Teri Peterson, a pastor who helped organize the pro-10A response in north-central Illinois’ Blackhawk Presbytery, acknowledged that while a handful…
Read More…st in today’s spiritual marketplace? Linn Marie Tonstad suggests that I am participating in a postmodern marketplace of religious ideas, choosing my “beliefs” from a smorgasbord of options. But then in the last sentence she seems to suggest that there might be a “marketplace” motive to my actions—that I might stand to benefit in the marketplace from my yearlong experience of atheism. First of all, I’m not sure what the marketplace of religious bel…
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…I walk down 10th Street toward the river, I read the signs of the water’s path: parked cars askew in the street, on the sidewalk; flooded basement after flooded basement; ribbons of detritus strewn in patterns that look like the banks of a rushing stream. As if it had been following the outlines of the map the flood stopped just short of Avenue B, not touching our Orange side of the street. * Zooming in, zooming out—calculating the odds. It gave…
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…dful of super lucky, sobbing teenagers were waiting for their super lucky, pale parents on a stage in an auditorium. Other parents, having checked and re-checked a sign-in list of bubbly teenage scrawl for their children’s handwriting, stood sentry outside—on rocks, on fences, anywhere to get a first glimpse of the busloads coming from the school. The mother prayed. Maybe superstitiously she decided not be selfish about it. She didn’t ask God to l…
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…at a healthy model for a Muslim society would be one in which religion was part of government. His example was not Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, but the rogue state we call the United Kingdom. Surely the stuff nightmares are made of. Yugoslavia started to fall apart in the early ’90s. First Slovenia broke off and then Croatia, leaving Bosnia, only 44% Muslim and nearly 30% Serbian, attached to a federation demographically dominate…
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