Religion Dispatches
…Great Disappointment. Such are the risks of prophesying a specific date. Since their emergence in the 1950s, UFO-religions have also shown an apocalyptic bent, a tendency fueled by the threat of nuclear annihilation, social unrest, environmental collapse and fears about a host of other man-made problems. In The End of the World as We Know It, a study of apocalyptic belief, Daniel Wojcik notes that UFO adherents tend to believe that extraterrestria…
Read More…n Paul II, Pope Benedict sent the following text message to Italian mobile phone users: “Let us go forth in the joy of the risen Lord and trusting in his permanent help.” JPII had been texting Italians with a “thought of the day” while he was still alive, so Benedict was simply carrying on this tradition. Pope Benedict has more recently used text messaging to communicate with attendees throughout this year’s World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. H…
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…health care system, give negroes their 40 acres and a mule, end our dependence on foreign oil, fix the public school system, bring jobs back from overseas, resolve the housing crisis, restore America’s reputation around the world, increase the minimum wage, get crunk in the White House, ensure equality among all people, end the pipeline to prison for little negro boys, pack the Supreme Court with some liberal judges that will uphold a woman’s righ…
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…enda” of abortion and gay marriage, and are voting on a “broader agenda,” including poverty, the environment, and global HIV/AIDS. The Take Back America conference, the annual policy confab sponsored by the progressive think tank Campaign for America’s Future, began regularly featuring a faith in public life panel, often showcasing the political talent that had lambasted the Democrats for allegedly ignoring them. By 2008, the constellation of orga…
Read More…On Fridays, many of us wouldn’t even go to work at all or for very long. Once we’d prayed Friday prayers, we could spill out into the streets and encounter more reminders to invoke blessings upon the Prophet. Life was not sliced off into religion and 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 prob…
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…at state universities, where suddenly legislatures did not need to be convinced of the importance of knowing something about other religious traditions from around the world. But there is something falsifying about this crude historical truism, the one claiming that religion enjoyed a tortured comeback of sorts in the year 2001. If anything, religion had already been “back” for a generation, by then. The really singular date for any contemporary…
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…tant population of Haiti is somewhere around thirty percent. In Port-au-Prince that number jumps to almost forty percent. The majority of these churches are Pentecostal. These churches are overwhelmingly independent, indigenous Haitian entities, though some are linked to North American denominational Pentecostal churches. Haiti, along with Jamaica and Puerto Rico, is home to one of the fastest growing Pentecostal populations in the Caribbean. As I…
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…nativist and white supremacist movements; the resulting volatile mix can encourage violence. We know that a rising crescendo of demonization and scapegoating can fuel violence against target groups. We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including…
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…ember of Congress demanding that the US government “impose crippling new sanctions on Iran,” including “provisions barring federal contracts to companies which are investing in Iran’s energy sector.” Increased pressure on Iran was queued up to be the number one issue for the conference, with conferees traveling to the Hill with one message: Raise the pressure on Iran now. But that message discipline was disrupted just two weeks before the conferen…
Read More…he tall trees. Or perhaps he (using the gender ascription of the Arabic, since pronouns are arbitrary functionaries of language anyway) had already set for the night. I will need to look for him where I last saw him, and when I last saw him: on this road toward the mosque, in the evening around tarawih time. I have my flashlight handy because once I past the community kitchen, the darkness is overwhelming. But I only need it for a short while. Aft…
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