Religion Dispatches
…e frog, which went skittering between the kayaks and swam away. “Go vegetarian!” Jeff yelled at the snake, who had already slithered away into the grass. Which leads me to my philosophical debate with my spouse. While I understand Jeff’s desire to end the frog’s suffering, my position is that one shouldn’t interfere with the cruelties of the wild—no matter how brutal—and that having the power to play God doesn’t mean we should. Jeff’s response is…
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…t us hope the offense of racism finds such recompense in America. In Malaysia and Indonesia, at the end of Ramadan there is a custom to seek forgiveness zahir and batin for offenses done knowing and unknowingly. We do not know all the time how our actions affect another person. So to keep the level of humanity in forgiveness straight let me say, in writing this blog, if I have offended anyone knowingly or unknowingly, please forgive me and astaghf…
Read More…il 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 getting increasingly shrill in his efforts to stop the shift toward equality. This week, on his official blog, he wrote: “Last…
Read More…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 said hajj would be a challenge because of gender restrictions. Then a friend described people doing tawaf, or circumambulation…
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…lay of marriage,” and “immoderate use of meat.” (What now for patrons of Brazilian steakhouses?) Of course, the struggle for full acceptance of LGBT people began way before efforts to repeal the so-called “fidelity and chastity” rule. Many folks mark the 1974 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church as the beginning of the movement for LGBT equality in the denomination, when David Bailey Sindt held up a sign asking, “Is anyone else out there…
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…ment of tacit complicity. “The leaders are just watching, and now the Nigerian social fabric is being disintegrated by acts of mob violence,” she said. “Now we have this new category as a result of the new law. And the government is quiet.” The Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers reports on LGBT Nigerians who are seeking asylum in the U.S. and Canada after experience violence in their home country. The article quotes one applicant for asylum saying…
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…igarettes; they were expensive, but they were there. The owner of the Italian restaurant downstairs who lost five large freezers full of food when rising ground water swamped his basement loaned me his phone. At the bar of a French restaurant that opened the day after the hurricane to serve red wine in plastic cups by candlelight, I learned that the proprietor had recently been convicted of starting a fire in the building during a bout of depres…
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…t be ridiculous.” And a bullet ricocheted all around the kitchen leaving crazy splats of blood, flew into the den, whizzing right by my oldest cousin’s head, then fell against the marble fireplace with a little clang. Bart was flat on his back, his glasses askew. My aunt, a nurse, performed CPR. The oldest tried to staunch his father’s wounds with paper towels. But Bart was already dead. *** I got to know my uncle’s killer, Jim. He’s a chatty, ear…
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…ewt Gingrich Islamophobia finds its way into all kinds of places; consider Ian Frazier’s wonderful Travels in Siberia, which does an admirable job of humanizing a part of the world we often associate with misery, death, and authoritarian backwardness. Frazier casually interjects his opinions of Islamic history, playing a hopscotch game with time and space. The effect is not pretty. Not only is Frazier wrong, he’s got it backwards. He compares Bin…
Read More…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…
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