Religion Dispatches
…tch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell phone and get in touch with them later today. Before the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I shou…
Read More…at cross purposes. My first thought was to kick myself for leaving my cell phone behind. This would have made a terrific picture. My second thought was to find a less obtrusive spot where I could watch to see how this excruciatingly slow drama would play out. But before I could move, my husband drifted up behind me in his kayak, took one look at the frog and snake and muttered, “I can’t take this.” Over my objections (“But it’s nature!”) Jeff stre…
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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…
Read More…g, highly observant LDS father. My friend described a brief, tension-laden phone call between father and son, wedged into a few free minutes after a church meeting. “Now, I’m going to serve my family,” said the father, bringing the call to a close. “Because that’s what I do.” And Mitt Romney is going to serve his country. Because that’s what he does. Like it or not. That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the G…
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…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…
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…o, was full of sightings of odd flying objects and occasionally of their pilots. Reflecting the optimism of the early nuclear age, a good number of these experiences portrayed these extraterrestrials as comical, or even friendly. A journalist named Frank Scully wrote a book claiming that aliens dressed in “the style of 1890” had been recovered from a saucer crash in the Mojave Desert in 1949. The Californian George Adamski claimed that in November…
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…as drunk, which was the only way she could handle getting up behind a microphone. God was barely mentioned. When asked about the secular nature of the vigil and why he agreed to participate, Rios responded that “it is always the responsibility of clergy to act in moments of disaster, regardless of the secular tone and style.” Throughout the vigil, he said, “[I] kept thinking of Jesus and where this radical Rabbi was in moments of disaster. I kept…
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…participate in the Women’s March on Washington if you feel called to, and phone-bank the hell out of every preposterous nominee Trump and the Republicans riding his coattails offer. But also participate in Lobby Days organized by your favorite local advocacy group, and make it a priority to meet your elected officials. If you feel comfortable doing so, introduce them to your family, and force them to look into the faces of the real people their d…
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…erything. So now if I’m trying to open up a bank account, I’m doing a cell phone application, or anything, that statement is there, it has just gone into everything, every aspect of one’s life, it’s there. It’s ridiculous to have that, but nonetheless it’s real. The problems are not just administrative: Ahmadis have a “glass ceiling” in the civil service, and discriminatory use of voter registration lists (Ahmadis are enrolled separately) keeps th…
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…ave to contest Republicans in suburban and rural districts. Running up the numbers in the cities just won’t cut it. So there’s problem one: the AHCA is very much a “Republican versus Democrat issue.” It wouldn’t exist without the extreme partisan divisions that exist today in the US, which are regional as much as numerical. Maybe I’m wrong, and this strategy call has some kind of secret weapon to overcome those divisions. Prayer and appeals to com…
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