Religion Dispatches
…eir microwave, not to bring their toaster oven and not to bring their cell phone. It was almost funny. Following that announcement from the now infamous loud “speaker,” he said that fajr prayer would be at 5:40. I should have thought more clearly about this, but as it stands, I have three different prayer time schedules: my iphone has one from the Ipray app; and I printed one off line from Islamicity; then collected one from my favorite mosque, wh…
Read More…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…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…This went on for four years and then suddenly, in 2006, she picked up the phone. We began a relationship that was literally 40 years in the making. Too bad I had already made plans to move to California and once again I would be the prodigal sister. Still we made up for lost time and had a relationship like none I have ever had as an adult. I believe I already mentioned that my second of three grandsons was born on the 22nd of December. We shared…
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…d 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 through social media,” Adee…
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…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …
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…obody 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 empowerment…
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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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…tersects the Church’s medieval sacramental structure. In 2011, a new smartphone app aimed to support preparation for and the practice of confession ended up generating more confusion than contrition when a not particularly social design invited people to conclude that absolution was granted by way of the Confession app itself rather than, according to Catholic teaching, through the mediation of the priest. No wonder Pope Benedict XVI’s Message fo…
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…ued until nightfall. They continued until counselors and nuns in habits outnumbered wild-eyed parents. Then some guy came over and asked for identifying information about their children—jewelry, tattoos, dental records. Two women went outside and threw up. A man who was shot while watching the premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado this July remembers that he was sitting in the fifth row of the theater. When the theater filled with s…
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