Religion Dispatches
…als for the Cordoba Movement are truly exceptional, our community in Lower Manhattan is local. Our focus is and must remain on the residents of Lower Manhattan and the Muslim American community in the Greater New York area. In the last 4 months we have seen real progress in the confidence of the Park51 team in explaining who and what they are. They are demonstrating a consistency in messaging, and despite some concerns about their Senior Advisor A…
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…o end. If my tribe (Brooklyn) attacked yours (Manhattan), then anyone from Manhattan could kill anyone from Brooklyn in response. Muhammad began preaching a faith with a strong social component. He worked as a spiritual and social reformer, though he operated in the categories of his time, reforming the institutions of his time given the possibilities of that time. This context is missing in most mainstream analysis of Shari’ah, such as Wood’s and…
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…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…
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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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…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…
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…h buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex, punching a massive hole that has filled up with…
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…Church and the evangelical right, whose precepts were laid out in the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, which stated: [W]e are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights o…
Read More…1994, served as a sort of precursor to the Manhattan Declaration. Like the Manhattan Declaration, the new document strikes a defiant tone in the face of legal advances – so much so that David Gibson of Religion News Service writes that it “reads like a declaration of war.” Among its assertions: “Christians who wish to remain faithful to the Scriptures and Christian tradition cannot embrace this falsification of reality, irrespective of its status…
Read More…s liberty” issue in its current incarnation can be traced back to the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto issued by Catholic, Evangelical and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders, including some 50 Catholic bishops, who forswore cooperation with laws sanctioning same-sex marriage or abortion. It was they who recast “religious liberty” beyond its traditional meaning to include the right of individuals and institutions who disagree with “a right t…
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…George W. Bush elected president and nearly eight after the signing of the Manhattan Declaration, the Vatican has discovered what had become the defining feature of the Christian Right in America: the conservative evangelical-Catholic convergence. And while Spadaro and Figueroa are critical of the sublimation of gospel values to the goal of right-wing political domination, it’s worth noting that the two issues that drove this convergence in the fi…
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