Religion Dispatches
…man Biergarten on Avenue C, up to Sheens on Avenue B, the bodega where you can spend $8 on a carton of milk and toilet paper. We live just to the west of Avenue B—bright red on the map, along with everything to the east. Mayor Bloomberg has ordered everyone living in the Red zone to evacuate. The storm looks big on the satellite images, really gnarly. I zoom in closer to make sure. Yes, our building is just on the other side of Zone A. From our…
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…eking to dictate coverage to the media surfaced this week in the form of a phone call taped during his presidential campaign that leaked online. In it, Sisi’s office manager, General Abas Kamal, is heard instructing spokesperson Ahmed Ali to give orders to journalists about what to say about Sisi. In another story, Thom Senzee writes for the Advocate: The current government crackdown on LGBT Egyptians has been amplified by hyperbolic media coverag…
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…Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the Birmingham jail, Romney was tormenting boys with long hair at Cranbrook, and his Church was still 15 years away from lifting its ban on black men serving in the priesthood. Romney was still nearly half a century away from pronouncing his contempt…
Read More…eeting. “Now, I’m going to serve my family,” said the father, bringing the call to a close. “Because that’s what I do.” And Mitt Romney is going to serve his country. Because that’s what he does. Like it or not. That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the GOP primaries. Onward grinds the contest, protracted unnaturally by super PAC money, and delivering few surprises: Romney continues to win the Northeast and W…
Read More…accepts. My perspective can best be summarized in a quote from my theological hero, John Caputo: “My own view is that the outcome of a careful debate about these matters would be to show that there simply are no arguments to show that homosexual love is of itself anything else than love, and that therefore, since the essence of the Torah is love, it hardly falls afoul of the law. To be sure, when it is not love, when it is promiscuity, or infidel…
Read More…himself during the most difficult spiritual season of his life immediately cast out by excommunication and cut off from his family—his wife and children—now, and for the eternities? Can any human being bear so much? Can this religion we love do any better? As members of the LDS Church prepare for one of the Church’s worldwide General Conferences this weekend, Bryan’s friend Jahn hopes Church officials will offer stronger, more compassionate guidan…
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…not to me civil disobedience.” At the same time, national religious political organizations “paternalistically” decide what the “important” issues are. Nonprofits providing social services—feeding or housing the homeless, helping unemployed with job hunting—are overwhelmed, with staffers working 50- to 60-hour weeks. His own participation “is not about me, I’m not like a lot of social justice people who come into a movement and are invested in ta…
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…than “a voice” and the things they perceive as necessities, such as health care, education, and so forth. A transvaluation of values. Of course you could say that voice is power and that necessities require wealth, but part of what they’re doing in the “temporary autonomous zone” of the occupation is to say something different in regard to those things. I do think that, especially as older people enter the movement, both at Wall Street and through…
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…tly what happened; it seems, as of now, that he was shot while trying to escape, quickly captured, and died of his wounds. Those who seized him did take him to an ambulance, but we’re not sure if he was tortured, mistreated, left to die—the details may or may not come out. But considering how much harm and evil he caused, it is little surprise the nation celebrates his expiration. So why should it matter how he died? As vile as bin Laden and Qadda…
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…ugh game-play and the repeated digital defeat of Qaddafi that without American help, nothing revolutionary can happen in the world. I am no specialist on Libyan history or politics myself, but I know that nearly anything that Kuma Games is likely to do with this scene will be overly simplistic and will do little but further encourage a dualistic view of world events: the insidious and increasingly ubiquitous sorting of everyone and everything into…
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