Religion Dispatches
…what these mosques actually signify. This fun fact dawned on her after her trip, while watching an IMAX movie; shouldn’t she have at least picked up a book on Islam before demanding the religion conform to her sensibilities? If power is blind, entitlement is deaf. Dowd is frustrated by her trip to Saudi Arabia—but it’s not clear why she expects that because Saudi Arabia is “the cradle of Islam,” that it would provide the best introduction to Islam…
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…that Santa himself had delivered it. My family had never been on a camping trip before, and the very idea of finding a tent in the house was so foreign, and truthfully so welcome, that it could only come from a source that was Wholly Other. Irrespective of anything that might be regarded as proof, at least until my father announced plans for an upcoming camping trip, that novelty and unforeseen possibility had no other name for me than Santa. “Sor…
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…etation of a complex and painful past. Specifically, the intense emotions around these issues reflect many Jews’ feeling that the Catholic Church itself, and not just individual Catholics, has unacceptably failed to face its own (perhaps indirect) complicity in the Nazis’ murder of Jews. The Church, including Benedict but also earlier Popes, resolutely rejects this linkage. The fallout from Benedict’s speech revealed just how unbridgeable this div…
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…de underscores the hard truth that the international system has little capacity to prevent mass atrocities, or to stop them in the early stages. The pioneering work of the privately, but seat-of-the-pants-financed, Satellite Sentinel Project has shown what can be done to document and expose aggressive military postures and on the ground horrors, notably mass graves. Bishop Andudu called on the U.S. government to use its own satellites to document…
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…dissuade them from questioning, let alone accepting, an all expenses paid trip to Israel—even when that trip is paid for by one of the doyens of Islamophobia, Sheldon Adelson. But who can resist that old, smiley Casino tycoon you might ask? Not famed Turkish American Muslim Dr. Mehmet Oz! On the plane ride to Israel, none other than Rabbi Shmuley Boteach interviewed Dr. Oz for the Jerusalem Post. Asked why he chose to come to Israel Dr. Oz replie…
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…s turn away from religion. In another well-known vignette, from his famous trip around the world—the voyage that many commentators see as the beginning of the end of his faith—Darwin tells a group of young women in Chile who are confused by his Anglican practice that he is “a sort of Christian.” You argue that rather than signaling an evolving loss of faith, such episodes hint at “a growing awareness that evolution was not just about physical form…
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…itarism” and his legacy of sustained struggle shrank further into the background. At the same time, memorials to the civil rights movement became national events—from President Bill Clinton’s trip to Little Rock for the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s desegregation of Central High School, to Congress’s decision to have Rosa Parks’s coffin lie in honor in the Capitol, to the First Family’s trip to Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anni…
Read More…ligious feelings.” Brown and NOM have not said anything publicly about his trip, even though he has otherwise bragged about his support for anti-gay activism overseas. NOM and declined to comment for the RWW story. But RWW unearthed coverage from inside Russia. Among the things Brown said in an interview: Right now you’re having the fight about adoption, but the adoption issue is indivisible from the marriage issue. If you don’t defend your value…
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…er (although I’m not at present). Furthermore, I am about to take my first trip to Israel, at the invitation of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. To prepare for my trip, I’ve been reading up on what’s happening in what I grew up understanding as “the holy land,” and writing reviews of what I’ve read in light of my broader work on religion, violence, and peacebuilding. The U.S.-based academics who supported this resolution clearly inte…
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…uthority over the Ukrainian Church disappears. In fact, without Jeremias’s trip, the argument could easily run in the other direction: i.e., that Moscow should be under the authority of Kyiv. Jeremias also deposed the existing metropolitan bishop of Kyiv and replaced him with a more friendly metropolitan. Well, it turns out the idea of Moscow as the center of secular and religious power in Eastern Europe was just as controversial in the 16th centu…
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