Religion Dispatches
…ing grateful for the gifts of life for being spared death for sight and hearing and bridges that don’t collapse. Yeah, why not? There have been more deaths in my immediate circle since last Ramadan than any one year in my life. I got to meet Abdurrahman Wahid, Gus Dur while he could still laugh and joke, an incredible man; my eldest brother, Sammuel; my first husband, Dawud, the father of my oldest two children; a dear, dear friend and colleague f…
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…slims and other non-Christian groups arrive in large numbers. But this is primarily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Bec…
Read More…ffice Building. Among Mormons, porn is considered a very serious problem, primarily for the damage it does to the marriages and families of the porn-addicted. Anyone who wants to talk seriously about corporate profits and morality needs to do much better than paint Mitt Romney as a porn accomplice because he sat on the board of Marriott hotels. Who else has made money from the porn industry? If you have profited from the digital economy, rai…
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…s discussed here. Lindsey offers a mass of evidence (quite disturbing if true) claiming sightings by military personnel who witnessed UFOs disarming nuclear weapons. In Lindsey’s interpretation, such disarmament fits a similar script as dystopian movies in which aliens “are fattening us up for lunch.” However Lindsey explains that this will be part of the tribulation, after the rapture—and, as already noted, complicit with the UN-led “one world go…
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…as designed to incite remain an everyday part of life, and an urgent human rights crisis for LGBT Ugandans. Ugandan human rights advocate, Julius Kaggwa, who visited Washington this week, told me that while the AHB would authorize the state to prosecute, imprison, and even put to death anyone the state deems homosexual, “to date we have more non-state violence directed at gay people.” That violence is both promoted by the government—one parliament…
Read More…ng and implementing the direct mail technology that helped build the new Christian right in the late 1970s, held at an election night event for tea partiers in Washington. He told them to get a good night’s sleep, eat a good breakfast, and then, Wednesday afternoon, get on with the work of taking over the Republican party. Long critical of “country club Republicanism,” Viguerie said in a press release: “The next stage of the Tea Party movement — T…
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…I also think about the woman in Ramadan who said, never mind about remembering, because when you are on Mt. Arafat, and you hold up your hands in supplication, it is like a book opens up in them and you remember. Even a more secular-type friend said she remembered to make du’a for all of us at Arafat. Well, I may surely remember a lot, but I’m taking notes too. I don’t think God would mind a cheat sheet. Still I hope at the moment that I really,…
Read More…was some messianic figure was an idea rooted only in the firm soil of authoritarian minds opposed to his election—but we hoped that what had been stored up in the rejection of all that came before that fall might be used to seed a new time in our history. I hoped that my nation might be headed in a new direction. I hoped that my people might be more generous and open. I hoped that the wars might finally come to an end. I hoped that the government…
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…ur fate to our genes or God. Free will works better than any other single criterion for gauging the vitality of a life, or a society. Choices, freely made, are what make life meaningful. When people doubt free will, they are more likely to behave badly. After reading a passage from a book that challenged the validity of free will, students were more likely to cheat on a mathematics exam. Others were less likely to let a classmate use their cell ph…
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…cing with the stars” practice to get on Facebook with her sister Willow to ride on a friend who had the chutzpah to say “Sarah Palin’s Alaska is failing so hard right now.” Willow’s response was to call the poster a gay slur, and Bristol jumping in the fray to respondL “you’re just running your mouth to talk sh•t.” I give the Palin girls credit: the apples didn’t fall from the tree. They attack just like their mother. I wonder what the sisters wou…
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