Religion Dispatches
…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
Read More…anyway) had already set for the night. I will need to look for him where I last saw him, and when I last saw him: on this road toward the mosque, in the evening around tarawih time. I have my flashlight handy because once I past the community kitchen, the darkness is overwhelming. But I only need it for a short while. After that I am surrounded by holiday lights in multiple colors and configurations. They celebrate this month with these decoration…
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…zmos that I’m carrying around with me. [pointing to digital recorder, cell phone, iTouch] Walter: That’s right. I think he’s the primary voice who anticipated all of this. It seems to me he is vindicated over and over and over again, that technology is not neutral, but that it brings an ideology with it. Dan: I’m more familiar with that from Niebuhr, who resists the “technic,” he says, and is more oriented to political science and economics, and s…
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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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…Cake If you have made it this far, then you can guess what comes next and last, because it is worst of all: the actual engagement with the Islamophobe. I offer you snippets from a conversation with a noted voice of the Islamophobic fringe, who I had the opportunity to engage—albeit on Twitter—some weeks ago. The topic was of course Islamophobia. After a long and meandering conversation, in which anything any reasonable person could say was twiste…
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…
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…largest democracy. Egypt: Backlash to Rainbow Flag Intensifies We reported last week on an anti-gay backlash spurred by social media reaction to video of a rainbow flag being waved at a concert. Reuters reports: Sarah Hegazy has been jailed, beaten by inmates, and could face a life sentence in an Egyptian prison if found guilty of “promoting sexual deviancy” and other charges tied to her alleged crime: waving a rainbow flag at a concert. The 28-ye…
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…us from having any union power.” He pointed at the proposal to reinstate Glass-Steagall as a concrete suggestion that could go a long way toward repairing the economic system. (Glass-Steagall was the 1933 law, repealed in 1999, which mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking activities; its repeal led to the financial services products that were central to the catastrophic economic collapse of 2008.) Actions with Consequences I…
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…nuel, 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 who fear black solidarity, and as a result these edifices have been the location for many of our nation’s most egregious racial terrorist acts.” In 1822, one of Emanuel’s founders, Denmark Vesey, was one…
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…g days at work. On Wednesday and Thursday he saw more than twice the usual number of patients at his abortion clinic, Aid For Women, in Kansas City, Kansas. But then, this has been an unusual few weeks. Since mid-June, Dr. Yeomans (and the other abortion providers in Kansas) have found themselves scrambling to see as many patients as possible before today; as of July 1, these facilities will not be able to offer abortion services until they show…
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