Religion Dispatches
…But back to Modern Family, and this episode’s second act, in which Manny (Rico Rodriguez), Jay’s stepson, weighs in on Jay’s nature spirituality. On the one hand, he explains, he likes “what Jay said about God being in nature,” and opts to join Jay for a day at the golf course—instead of church. But once there, Manny begins to pester Jay with the obvious existential questions that arise for those questioning theism. He asks, “So aren’t you worrie…
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…can violence in the ’80s: Fernandez, Menendez, Flores, Velasquez, Perez. A Puerto Rican drag queen had performed that night. In the photographs taken in daylight, the living clutching one another are mostly young and brown. Are they refugees, the children of refugees, undocumented? Irrelevant. They are the living. Among the dead, a young man texting his mother: “Mommy I love you. He’s coming. I’m going to die.” In the 1980s queers in San Francisco…
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…is the tool of innocence; so many of these armed men said, “the gun is the promotion of peace.” But it’s also simultaneously the transgression. That’s what the thrust of “Thy Rod” and the sexual innuendo of it means—the way that’s also the transgression of a White man who’s doing his best James Brown imitation. Because in that imagination, Blackness is a kind of sexuality, and Kunnemann possesses that potent sexual power in the same way that he cl…
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…in New York, which has an enormous pedigree, has done wonderful things in promoting a way of life and developing American society, but at the end of the day is still socialist. This is a slightly disguised echo of the charge that has circulated among anti-Semites at least as early as the October 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia when a pamphlet titled “The Jewish Bolshevism” was circulated along with the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion…
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…giously unaffiliated (34%). Spotlight the Catholic congregations assisting Puerto Rican refugees and highlight Mike Pence’s threat to reproductive rights and education. Pennsylvania: With its highly religious—and highly conservative—central region balancing Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is a tough nut to crack. For a faith outreach director it would probably be best to do little more than the ordinary outreach to keep things close in t…
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…re for all who strive for it. Never mind the Republican Party’s efforts to promote McCarthyist laws that restrict discussions of the history of racism and other supposedly “divisive concepts” in America schools; or its leadership’s denigrating characterizations of political leaders of color with whom they disagree. And who here really cares that the Republican Party has championed voter suppression and gerrymandering that disproportionately affect…
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…against their will during the slavery era, to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican women who were forcibly sterilized, America has repeatedly demonstrated the savage violence of which it is capable. But this moment’s wide-ranging threat also points to our deepest promise: We’re all in the same fight together. Jewish people whose religious traditions enshrine abortion rights in thousands of years of halachic tradition; trans siblings and all t…
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…multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multinational. Mattera, who identifies as “Puerto Rican and Italian,” writes in his 2022 book, The Global Apostolic Movement & The Progress of the Gospel, that he doesn’t understand why many conservative evangelicals object “to the immigration of Muslims and Latinos.” “I am against illegal immigration, but will welcome and aid any illegal that comes to our church…. We have seen many Muslims come to Christ in our com…
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…n, labeled as belonging to poor folks of many races — poor whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, American Indians — and a pair of worried politicians speaking together in the background, with a caption that reads, “What worries me, senator, is that they’re getting into step.” Building the unity of the poor and dispossessed is itself an act of building political power. Yet talking about centering the ethical framework of the poor isn’t the same as romanti…
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…rated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket” -excerpt from “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri Then the lights went out and the stage lit up, and 60,000 white people finally started paying attention. My neighbors were two beers in when Bono shouted out to all of the women in his life, while reminding us that his-tory was just as much her-story. It was around this time that he made everyone feel welcome “no matter who you voted f…
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