Religion Dispatches
…o do. For one thing, it has two alarm options, and buttons light up to indicate which of the two. Buttons also light up to indicate a.m. and p.m. since it is not a 24 hour clock. The mistake I make most often is to set the alarm for p.m. instead of a.m., and then when I miss or oversleep I am surprised to hear the adhan at some time in the afternoon that day. To make matters worse; after I changed the clock to 4:55 (I think, a.m.) I suddenly reali…
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…inimal guidelines, with room to—no, more like a mandate to—adjudicate on a case-by-case basis. We cannot predetermine shares at all. I once calculated if I divided the bequest (legally restricted to one-third) between my three daughters (although some jurists say you cannot bequest to legal heirs), then divided the remainder what would happen. They would have slightly more than the share to my two sons. Then I thought, its not like Allah cannot do…
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…s, the campaign for 10A mirrored secular campaigns that advocate for political causes or candidates, although the “Holy Spirit factor” acknowledges a layer of mystery. More Light Presbyterians’ Adee sums up the ground game as follows: “We followed the example of 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 ca…
Read More…nd branding. Nor am I attracted to atheist churches like Sunday Assembly because I just don’t care for the format of an evangelical worship service. One of the perks of being an atheist is not having to do that anymore. I’ve been in the religion business all my life and I just need a break. Is this some kind of apophatic journey of the soul similar to those undergone by the Desert Fathers and Mothers? Part of this for me is the epistemology of thi…
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…ential for ethical living in the digitally-integrated world. In the past decade, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse, News of the World phone-hacking, and Wikileaks scandals have marked new, and only very incompletely explored, ethical territory as we sort out the best ways to balance personal privacy and public safety as these are impacted by our engagement with new media. But even given difficulties defining necessary and appropriate boundaries of p…
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…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 was my stepfather saying, “I have some bad news.” I thought, “My m…
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…bias has led to the deaths of tens of thousands in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Caucasus, leaves me dumbfounded. In Conclusion: Looking Forward I am not so dense as to argue that Muslims have always behaved innocently, and that is not the conclusion I want you to walk away with. We have more than enough examples of heinous acts committed by Muslims, sometimes justified in the name of Islam. In fact the first article I wrote for this magazine condemne…
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…
Read More…ng of the country.” In 2010, the White House refused to comment on DuBois’ phone call to religious right ideologue David Jeremiah after the latter called the president “a dangerous person” moving the country toward “socialism.” It was obviously an incident the White House would have preferred DuBois just let go. Boorstein’s piece suggests that some critics believe that the office would have performed better had DuBois been more experienced and the…
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