Religion Dispatches
…ce. A few years ago I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a huge conference on multiculturalism and reconciliation. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, author of the book, A Human Being Died that Night, was another of the speakers. She is a clinical psychologist by training, and was asked to serve on the truth and reconciliation committee after the end of apartheid in South Africa. Eventually, she was asked to act as personal psychologist for a man known…
Read More…anization 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 time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in N…
Read More…out what the Muslims “are really doing.” All this from a public radio audience. With renunciation of Dove Outreach coming from even the most outspoken anti-Muslim public figures (both political and religious) maybe the whole mess will serve to dial back the Islamophobic rhetoric a bit. The Wall Street Journal has reported that “residents of Gainesville are trying to get the word out that the actions of one tiny church don’t reflect the city. Along…
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…the Obama campaign and ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and throug…
Read More…omething I’ve found in Mormon politics: there is a contradiction between incredible concern Mormons show for the individual and yet a reticence or even a resistance to thinking about the systematic problems and injustices the put individuals in impossible and even harmful situations. It’s a major disconnect. How would you begin to address that disconnect? I would encourage people to take a deep breath and a step back and look at some of the comp…
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…And nobody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowe…
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…nity where the expression of personal perspectives is rich relational currency. It functions not merely as self-construction or -revelation, but as digital generosity which enriches relationships as it invites further engagement—in the best of cases, even with those of differing perspectives. Father James Martin, SJ, for instance, criticized LeMoine’s actions against Cihak and his family on both Facebook and Twitter, tweeting “If you deny the sac…
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…ily has been pierced by violence, people assume you are interested in violence. And you are. Very. Like cancer victims are very interested in CAT scans. Maybe it’s inchoate coping, maybe it’s autonomic rubbernecking, but the first thing you always need to know is how someone learned that life as she or he knew it was over. I got a phone call. It was about midnight on October 23, 1998. I thought it was my husband calling to say he would be late. It…
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…am I arguing the same conditions will pertain here. But I point to the inconsistency of the Islamophobia industry Wajahat Ali described: they refuse to admit to any kind of bias against Islam or Muslims because that bias is the ground they stand on. And to claim there is no such thing as bias against Islam or Muslims when, in the past decades, such bias has led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Caucasus, leaves me du…
Read More…Unless by “data-driven analyst” he means is a guy who knows how to arrange numbers on a page to make a case just plausible enough secure buy-in from a cultivated crew of underwriters and investors who are already inclined to believe him. Which, actually, just may be what “data-driven analyst” means these days. I don’t believe that spreadsheets are a scale model of reality. I do believe that professional political directors should have a grip on r…
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