Religion Dispatches
…s: the Islamophobe must assume Muslims suffer some sort of pre-Islamic inferiority, sufficient to explain how some (largely non-white) people—actually, a lot of people—not only fell for Islam in the first place, but then stayed down. How long do enforced ideologies last? Nazism: twelve years. Communism: some decades. Islam: Fourteen centuries and counting. Those are some dumb people. But regardless of whether certain mental defects incline a p…
Read More…Romney campaign from the Sunday Boston Globe. Romney’s campaign, Kranish writes, “made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes, that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.” To wit: Team Romney was (as we all knew) far too timid in telling the candidate’s personal story—especially his faith and his service in his fai…
Read More…mehow hostile to religion, or insufficiently committed to the country’s “Christian heritage.” While the president is undoubtedly entitled to receive and read whatever religious materials he desires, should they really be coming from a White House staffer? Two years ago, Jacques Berlinerblau, the Georgetown professor and proponent of secular government, criticized Obama’s “platitude fest” at the National Prayer Breakfast and compared the faith-base…
Read More…evelation, which holds that the Second Coming will occur after an era of Christian dominance). American Vision is a non-profit, tax exempt, educational organization. Like many of these groups, DeMar also has a companion organization that can raise money and promote candidates for elected office: Vision to America. Yesterday, Vision to America sent a fundraising appeal in support of Nevada’s Republican nominee to the U.S. Senate, Sharron Angle, fro…
Read More…e, just awkward conversation. At one point Victoria asked Nikita what his priorities are now, and he replied, “I can give you an acronym for it.” (So many possibilities: LOL? ATM? YOLO? YMMV? DKNY? Ooh ooh! No no no, I know: WWF!) Eventually Nikita elaborated that his priorities were: “…God first, others second, and myself last.” Which, erm, strictly speaking, would be GOM. But I gather he meant JOY. In any case, the only rekindled romance for a…
Read More
…anes, and throngs of tourists coming to pay their respects to the 9/11 Memorial Tribute Center, and, it seems, simply to stand on the street and ogle the spot of sky where the towers used to be. So I was kind of shocked to find out recently that from 1880 to 1940, the stretch of the Lower West Side of Manhattan from Park Street down to Battery Park, along Greenwich and Washington Streets, was known as “Little Syria.” An exhibit of the same name ha…
Read More
…w in the street, on the sidewalk; flooded basement after flooded basement; ribbons of detritus strewn in patterns that look like the banks of a rushing stream. As if it had been following the outlines of the map the flood stopped just short of Avenue B, not touching our Orange side of the street. * Zooming in, zooming out—calculating the odds. It gave me a desperately needed illusion of control in the face of the unknown of the storm. And if noth…
Read More
…ie-wearing “black boy,” to use that loaded phrase of the African-American writer Richard Wright. We must struggle against this “American god” or the idol of the white, western god-man. Indeed, we must struggle against this god with an eye toward a different social order and under the realization that things don’t have to be this way—and that they must change. What I’m in effect calling for is a Christianity uncoupled from this nation-state project…
Read More…r of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private practice would rather not perform abortions for any number of possible reasons, including threats on their lives—you’d be left unsatisfied. Likewise, the report expresses grave concern over the fact that the very same clinics that seek Title X reimbursements for contraception are also the clinics perform a lot of…
Read More
…dominance. That wasn’t my interest so much as being able to go back and retrieve cultural and historical references of the black female presence within the African diaspora that say the black woman is God. I was more interested in black women taking on that ideology and having them affirm that in a creative way. But some are saying it’s problematic to even take on this idea of the black woman being God. What are the spiritual ramifications of that…
Read More