Religion Dispatches
…ends said hajj would be a challenge because of gender restrictions. Then a friend described people doing tawaf, or circumambulation around the kaaba, while sending text messages on a mobile phone. I just cannot see totally giving up my one-on-one moments with Allah just for a blog. That being said, let the preparations to meet the king begin….
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…ous movement demanding preferential treatment? RD reached out to Istvan by phone and asked some hard questions about transhumanism as a philosophy and a movement. He may not have won my vote, but Istvan won me over during our discussion of religious subsidies, global warming, and why transhumanism skews white and male. We also explored the spiritual elements of Istvan’s own thinking and debated about whether transhumanism should embrace its religi…
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…sis for LGBT Ugandans. Ugandan human rights advocate, Julius Kaggwa, who visited Washington this week, told me that while the AHB would authorize the state to prosecute, imprison, and even put to death anyone the state deems homosexual, “to date we have more non-state violence directed at gay people.” That violence is both promoted by the government—one parliamentarian has said if he had a lesbian daughter, he would hang her—and carried out by pri…
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…stion: “Are UFOs Real?” If you missed the show, here it is on Lindsey’s website. Lindsey’s short answer to CNN’s question is that yes, indeed, UFOs are real and fully understandable, almost predictable, in terms of Lindsay’s dispensationalist end-times scenarios. They are literal demons and are further evidence for a plot that is “subtly advancing us toward the predicted one-world government.” Perhaps more diligent channel-surfers than I can shed…
Read More…entified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies.” He then admitted he’d not read the Qur’an because he “doesn’t read fiction.” Another who insisted he didn’t “hate other religions or cultures” then argued that the “so-called Christians” (referring to the…
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…
Read More…school with a burn mark on his arm in the shape of a cross. His parents visited the school, looking for answers. When they felt they didn’t get them, they filed suit against both the Mt. Vernon School District and Freshwater. The district settled with the Dennis family last summer, although the suit against Freshwater awaits. Meanwhile, a federal judge in the civil suit against Freshwater issued an order last week directing Freshwater’s attorneys…
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…rinking out of the bottle. I was totally discombobulated. And then I got a phone call from the folks at Love Center Church in Oakland, Walter Hawkins, and he was going to be out of town and wanted to know if I would come and minister and preach for them. I hadn’t preached in five years. I didn’t know where my Bible was. How about that? And of course everything in me wanted to say no but my mouth said yes. Did you know them? Yes, but I wasn’t on th…
Read More…raphed a piece of paper on the dashboard of Roeder’s car: It contained the phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, who served two years in prison for conspiring to bomb abortion clinics in 1988. Roeder also told me that Sullenger was present at the lunch with Newman where they discussed “justifiable” homicide, and that Newman had given Roeder the autographed copy of his book just three months before Roeder kille…
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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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