Religion Dispatches
…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
Read More…hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Nevada Senate race — along with several others like it — to achieve conservative victory. This plan includes running statewide television and radio ads, sending direct mail to targeted voters, and operating phone banks — all geared toward defeating Harry Reid in November. DeMint apparently does not think the Reconstructionists are an irrelevant fringe movement, as many others seem to think, since he’s pai…
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…oogle uses of unreliable information, shown as the result of a search on a phone, reads, “ufo filmed traveling 106 mph.” This new algorithm will allow regulation of user generated witness testimonies. We’ve had witness testimonies for a long time. Is it really suddenly okay to talk about UAPs? Closer examination of this question reveals that it is only okay to talk about certain sightings—those ensconced within a military framework, and new algori…
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…molition of the Babri Masjid, a medieval mosque, by a Hindu mob in India in 1992 triggered violence against Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as many religiously-motivated pogroms afterwards. A few weeks ago, I spoke on the phone with a leader of New York City’s Bangladeshi Hindu community, who was extremely resistant to making the connection between the persecution of his fellow Hindus in Bangladesh and the persecution of Muslims in Indi…
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…mpet in the high school marching band, of my grandfather mixing drinks at a 1960s dinner party, of my sister’s and my first communion, and of our many relatives, long since dead, whose names I can no longer keep track of. In the dining room sits my great-grandparents’ table, having weathered countless birthday celebrations and holiday meals. And here is where my great-grandaunt’s bookshelf stands, where I store the books I can’t quite justify lett…
Read More…eration immigrant Muslims miss. They miss the ability to pray outdoors, in airports and bazaars: they miss not only the ability to pray under the sky, but the knowledge that the act of praying in public might be shared vicariously by many. Or at least the act of praying would not be construed as something completely Other. The experience of prayer would not be clouded over the knowledge that it meant terror, alienation, and foreignness to onlooker…
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…lovers, queer friends and childless Catholic couples as well. An estimated 1.1 billion people belong to the Roman Catholic church. But even many of those who aren’t Catholic consider the pope’s words influential or have concerns about how his words can affect cultures, laws, and policies. I understood why they were dismayed. As an interspecies minister and animal chaplain who identifies as bisexual, doesn’t have children, and lives with her husba…
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…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…
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…ary discussion of the resurgence of politicized neo-traditional religion is 1979, not 2001. It was in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary movement seized power in Iran. It was in 1979 that Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority in the United States and began lobbying hard, not just for a fundamentalist return to the political arena, but for the neo-conservative agenda of then–candidate Ronald Reagan. It was in 1979 that John Pau…
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…udiences of folks concerned about rising prejudice and bigotry. After April 19, 1995, people began to take Ward more seriously, as bodies were removed from the Oklahoma City Federal Building, collapsed by a truck bomb delivered by a domestic terrorist seeking to shift the right-wing populists into an armed insurrection. Timothy McVeigh failed to achieve his goal, but 168 people died in the process. On January 19, the people of Massachusetts electe…
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