Religion Dispatches
…” Embedded within Maller’s statement may reside the real motivation behind American Jewry’s growing embrace of cremation. Where there is demand, there will be supply. In that peculiarly capitalistic sense, cremation may deserve to be understood the same way we now understand observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher—that is, as one of those aspects of Judaism that modern American Jews feel free to pick and choose from, honoring them in increasingly…
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…pean? Are their “culture and politics” more like white, Christian, Italian-Americans or brown, Muslim, Pakistani-Americans? This isn’t really a question the essay sets out to answer, but it’s revealing, isn’t it? American Islam is tremendously variegated, as indeed is the conservative movement, as the essay itself reveals. But do all American Muslims cluster together, culturally and politically, because they are Muslim? Is their (our/my) Islam mor…
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…eking to dictate coverage to the media surfaced this week in the form of a phone call taped during his presidential campaign that leaked online. In it, Sisi’s office manager, General Abas Kamal, is heard instructing spokesperson Ahmed Ali to give orders to journalists about what to say about Sisi. In another story, Thom Senzee writes for the Advocate: The current government crackdown on LGBT Egyptians has been amplified by hyperbolic media coverag…
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…lt, particularly since the church wouldn’t leave me alone. (I got repeated phone calls, letters, and visits to my home from missionaries and people in the congregation, despite formal requests that they stop.) Eventually I sought a community of people also striving to come to terms with what it meant to have been but no longer be a devout Mormon. Luckily a diverse community of ex-, post-, or lapsed Mormons (we differ on what to call ourselves) thr…
Read More…eporter about homophobic attitudes in Romania and about the role played by American religious conservatives. (The Liberty Counsel took marriage-refusing county clerk Kim Davis on a tour of Romania to drum up support for a referendum putting a marriage ban in the constitution, an effort being promoted by the Orthodox Church.) “It’s the only cause in the world that American money and Russian Money are given for the same cause, which is anti-LGBT pol…
Read More…ic.” They warned that international institutions like the Organization for American States and United Nations are pushing an agenda that would “destroy the foundations and values underpinning the Judeo-Christian culture.” They also claimed that there is an agenda to silence churches and eradicate Christians. The group urges pastors to “guide” their parishioners about “the profile of the candidate for whom they should vote” in May 15 elections. Isr…
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…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…
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…opponents of the proposition ‘raising millions of dollars from wealthy gay Americans,’ campaign organizers said they have already raised $15 million of their minimum $23 million [including a reported $500,000 gift from Wildmon’s American family Association and $400,000 from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family] budget and have plans for special offerings to be taken in churches around the country.” The Yes on Prop 8 campaign plans “precinct-by-preci…
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…sovereign of the universe something of which Krieger, again, in that deep American tradition best personified by Herman Melville, remains suspicious of—which is to say armed against. War in the name of faith is a recurring theme, as with cell-phone videos of beheadings. Krieger reads such rage within a dichotomy of “fundamentalist repression” and its opposite, freedom. Alhough she prefers the phrase “over-pervy libertinism” as, for her, the dicho…
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…ionships between individuals, but is more easily disseminated to a greater number of people. We experience AI as a crisis because, like the rabbis of the Talmud, we actually have conflicting needs and desires. We crave the efficiency of AI because it can save time and effort, helping us write emails, make phone calls, and recall and summarize information. At the same time, we’re seeking human connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provid…
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