Religion Dispatches
…ccurred to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to t…
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…alse—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the tarmac. The responding authorities found neither shooters nor evidence of any shots fired. The most likely explanation offered for the panic was that the cheering of Olympics fans for Usain Bolt’s performance in the 100 meters sounded like gunfire. In an episode titled “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” from…
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…ek, this message is not the grievance of a disgruntled customer. It is a witness to an abomination. It is a plea for spiritual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, r…
Read More…t together by their opposition to the tea party. At the same time, though, Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen Thurman and State Sen. Chris Smith are calling for Meeks to remain in the race. The Meeks campaign is saying that he is, under no circumstances, considering withdrawing. They contend that the whole story is the mother of all dirty tricks; a behind-the-scenes creation of the Crist campaign. Currently governor of Florida, elected as a…
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…activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Theology in D…
Read More…of the cases in five Southern states and Nevada. In subsequent years, the numbers fell: there were 209 church arsons in 1997 and 166 the following year, according to their annual reports. The last report was issued in 2001. Altogether there were almost 900 reported cases of church arson in the late 1990s—a huge number compared to what we’ve seen in the last two weeks. A second difference is that of public response. In 1995-96, there was a unique…
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…lescing in the 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign to rescind a Dade County, Florida anti-discrimination ordinance. Both types of coverage set gay sexuality over and against monogamous heterosexual families. In stories such as the Florida repeal, opponents of homosexuality, like the campaign’s spokeswoman Anita Bryant, explicitly argued that the ordinance was immoral and anti-family. In articles about gays’ open sexuality, narratives implicitly set…
Read More…even have the courtesy to check Trayvon’s phone for his mom and dad’s telephone numbers because it’s just a black criminal’s body to them. While Zimmerman the trigger man slept in his bed, the police ordered a drug and alcohol test for Trayvon’s lifeless body. A black body that was representative of evil against the whiteness of George Zimmerman. I hesitated to write about this story, because there are many good stories about Trayvon and his pare…
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…of Christian LGBT groups. South Africa: Profile of gay Imam with Hindu partner At the India Times, Shweta Sengar profiles Muhsin Hendricks, a gay Imam with a Hindu partner. Hendricks grew up in Cape Town in a very small Muslim community, which was very orthodox and conservative. His grandfather was a cleric at a local mosque, which was just a stone’s throw away from the house. “Homosexuality is a sin, said my grandfather and people who engage in…
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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