Religion Dispatches
…of The Bible to be called ‘The Princess Diana Bible’. Revision Studios in New Mexico, USA will fund the new translation of the Bible, in which God says it is better to be gay than straight. Mitchell also hopes to adapt the book for a two-part mini-series, ‘The Gay Old Testament’ and ‘The Gay New Testament’. “There are many different versions of the Bible, I don’t see why we can’t have one,” said Mitchell. Aside from a little problem figuring out…
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…assignment for The Washington Post, a cover story for the magazine about a new African American synagogue in DC started in 2008 by Mother Dailey’s grandson, Eli Aronoff. (Aronoff claims no Ashkenazi ancestry despite his surname—his father was from rural South Carolina.) Neither my story nor the new congregation succeeded—the Post axed the story during a shakeup of the magazine’s editorial staff in 2009, and Aronoff’s congregation recently decided…
Read More…were fully intact, would we even have Trump running things right now? The new ad is clearly intended to shut down any actual reflection on this point and to associate voting for Biden with making your worries go away. Replace a scary old white man with a (more) benign one. What could be simpler? 2. Treating Trump and Trumpism under the “aberration” category is dangerously misleading (also something else that many of us know in our bones). Trump’s…
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…most of the members that I spoke with on Saturday, many of whom are young newcomers to the city. Krewe du Jieux offers a chance to join in on the fun, blending Jewish and New Orleanian cultural traditions: a klezmer-inflected brass band that occasionally bursts into a jazzy rendition of Hava Nagila. There are, of course, lots of ways to participate in carnival. Many krewes have open membership and no waiting lists. But the distinctively culturall…
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…nation, it is impossible to know whether opening communion would encourage newcomers or turn away existing members, but it is certainly an issue worth following. The End is Where? It goes almost without saying that mainline Protestantism is in an extended period of at least numerical, if not spiritual, decline, and many commentators have taken the occasion of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church—still an important symbol of normative Ame…
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…rriage and, thus, have second-class status. These findings have prompted a new legislative push for same-sex marriage within the state; debate over the measure will begin this fall. To fight potential legislation that would provide marriage rights to same-sex couples in New Jersey, the bishops have joined conservative Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus that are aligned with right-wing Republicans. The bishops have asked parishes t…
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…, all living vertically next to the elevated train tracks, in time-honored New York City tenement tradition. Only, in contrast to Chinatown or the Lower East Side, there is nearly nothing left of Little Syria. I walked what remains of Little Syria with Joseph Svehlak, a longtime tour guide and founder of Friends of the Lower West Side, whose mother, of Czech heritage, grew up in the neighborhood. He hadn’t realized its significance to the Arab Ame…
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…to take root in Palestine. But that same social context also gave rise to new Arab newspapers such as El Carmel and El Palestine, around which coalesced a collective Palestinian identity. These papers openly challenged the Zionist project (not the “Jews”) and warned the Arabic-reading public of an ensuing confrontation. As Rashid Khalidi argues in his book Palestinian Identity (2009) Loeterman suggest that Zionist and Palestinian identity emerge…
Read More…terminal, Terminal 5, has recently been opened at Fiumicino, an antiseptic new structure standing at some considerable remove from the other four terminals I knew. It is linked by shuttle bus, but they come infrequently, and the ride is a long one. Terminal 5 itself seemed empty, institutional, and almost eerily silent. Terminal 5 is a product of the new post-9/11 realities. To be sure, many European airports have long segregated US-bound and Isra…
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…ur identity, whether it’s slave or free, ultimately fades away and we have new dignity, status and value in Christ—so we ended up in that liberating trajectory on the issue of slavery even though the New Testament doesn’t explicitly condemn it. In the very same passage it talks about how male and female is something that doesn’t affect people’s status when we’re baptized in Christ, so I argue that hierarchy and gender in marriage is not intrinsic…
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