Religion Dispatches
…tch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell phone and get in touch with them later today. Before the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I shou…
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…n’t have true fidelity without some kind of radical equality. So there’s a number of different counterweights there: women need to be free to make choices for themselves, but they need to be faithful to their relationships. Meanwhile, their partner needs to be faithful to the relationship while allowing that person to have some power and some choice. Walter: That’s right. And of course when you say all that, that’s why the issue is so difficult. T…
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…tic to oppose LGBT equality, as Salon explains. Just three years ago, on a phone call with faith leaders supporting the Tea Party movement, Price agreed that there are “consequences of activity that has been seen as outside the norm,” suggesting that increased health care costs for LGBT people are a result of some abnormal activity. (Yes, that’s code for anal sex. Or gender-affirming surgeries. Or marrying the person you love most in the world, if…
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…tally, I see what you mean, because when I’m scared, I turn on the lights, phone a friend, or commit genocide. It is true that Izetbegovic was influenced by Islam; but, for him, Islam was no different than Catholicism was for many Poles, who reached out to a religious leader (the Pope) to advance a political agenda of liberation. Izetbegovic went to jail for his religiously-inflected activism, which isn’t surprising considering Yugoslavia was a Co…
Read More…, “I was thinking about going down there and whoopin’ her…but I was on the phone with the police, too…I called the police…I was very offended. There were too many kids, women, and children down there.” While I am sure that Lewis was concerned about Badu’s nudity in front of the other “women and children,” I imagine she was equally uneasy about the implications of reproducing the violence of slavocracy in a post Civil War society. In short, not onl…
Read More…’ offices pretty much go directly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor…
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…ide. Others emerging from the Starbucks across the street, talking on cell phones or carrying laptops. Conversations on the park’s benches. For a city accustomed to itinerant protesters, a population glued to mobile devices, as well as the homeless sleeping in the shadows of the halls of power, it quite possibly looked like any other day in the heart of the nation’s capital. That passersby appeared to ignore the protesters was appropriate: Occupy…
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…ow what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Thomas…
Read More…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…
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…fined as a vagrant. So members always carried five dollars and money for a phone call. Benjamin Zeller, author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, has also noted that Heaven’s Gate members engaged in a lot of self-deprecating humor because they were aware that mainstream society perceived them as crazy. This research led Jones to conclude that a comedy about Heaven’s Gate might not be as inappropriate as it sounds. “I could never make a come…
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