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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…harist, that the eucharist is the model of shared abundance. I think the African Americans in the United Church of Christ have it right: they call it the “welcome table.” The table of military consumerism is not welcoming, so that the eucharist really contradicts that. Dan: To go back to Cavanaugh for a minute, he has this really interesting idea that the nation-state—which is pretty much what you call the “national security state”—has this need t…
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…follow through on his election-night promise to be “a President for all Americans.” That means it’s up to all Americans to stand up for their neighbors and friends, but especially the people of color, undocumented people, Muslims (and non-Christians in general) and queer folks that you don’t know. Because right now, we are terrified. If you have the privilege of being able to “wait and see” how the Trump administration comes after your family (and…
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…, as opposed to say democracy; he wants a symbol of Christianity (read, America) in Mecca. But this picture is all wrong. American culture dominates the world, while the Muslim world struggles to produce anything. Indeed, a visitor to Mecca is undoubtedly struck by the degree of its Americanization—there are Burger Kings, KFC, a Starbucks, a Victoria’s Secret, a Sbarro’s, and even a Paris Hilton store. Third, Gingrich believes Mecca is responsib…
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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…on to back military control. Back in 2014, Sisi’s tame media even began fabricating smears that the Brotherhood itself was responsible for the “spread” of homosexuality. (The Brotherhood, despite its vocal conservatism, had carried out virtually no arrests under the “debauchery” law: They had, after all, no religious credentials to prove.) In one notorious case, headlines blared that a man charged with “debauchery” had been converting other men to…
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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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…e than a church.” It is “a place of worship that was founded by African Americans seeking liberty” and “a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.” Yet, as Obama noted, Emanuel, like other black churches, has been the target of violence, not just last night, but throughout its history. In an excellent essay at TPM, Benjamin Park writes about how black churches have long “served as a flashpoint for hatred from those…
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…TREO, and I’m not canceling the media package on my phone or reducing the number of messages I sent through that magical device. I am not calling for a technology purge. I’m simply noting that technology comes with a price, and this price has something of a postmodern twist. By this I mean that tweeting and other high-tech modalities of exchange send information about happenings, attitudes, feelings, and events—but in a way that disconnects life…
Read More…to a much larger issue: the loss of control of black bodies that have historically been regulated through both verbal and visual representations. This reality cannot be ignored. Historical ideas on race and gender have viciously consumed black subjectivity, chewed it up and spit it out as a new creation—a market piece with a mythical identity, name and meaning. These ideas cross-pollinate the social-cultural landscape. Thus, the emphasis on contro…
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