Religion Dispatches
…xious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very least, I thought I had a responsibility to the Muslim students on campus. (Then again, I really had no idea what to do. I just thought I had to do something, anything, to help.) Walking into our prayer space, which was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a frien…
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…cross religion, science, and society. I reached out to Levinovitz over the phone to discuss organic food, birth control, alternative medicine, and the role of naturalness in explaining COVID-19. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. When did the concept of “natural” first grab your attention? When I was working on food I noticed that people often use “nature” and “natural” as their justification for whatever it was that they happe…
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…o-life, conservative state. Senator Crain’s office did not return repeated phone calls, but according to The Daily Beast, he “said the bill is simply a statement that Oklahoma is ‘pro-life.’” Senate Pro Tem Brian Bingman said much the same thing, according to Reuters, offering that “Oklahoma is a conservative pro-life state—we are proud to stand up for what we know is right.” Well, yes, it feels very good to be proud of things, doesn’t it? Might I…
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…And commenter Karen West writes: “Lila has the beauty and brains to do any number of things, but instead, she is laying down her life for those most innocent of all.” But not everyone on the religious right believes that Lila Rose is acting out God’s will, let alone laying down her life. After all, Lila Rose lies in order to get the footage she seeks. She and her colleagues pose as underage pregnant teens, as sex traffickers, as statutory rapists….
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…ionships between individuals, but is more easily disseminated to a greater number of people. We experience AI as a crisis because, like the rabbis of the Talmud, we actually have conflicting needs and desires. We crave the efficiency of AI because it can save time and effort, helping us write emails, make phone calls, and recall and summarize information. At the same time, we’re seeking human connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provid…
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…owing same sex marriages, is reaching epic proportions. During a late-July phone call to pastors gathered at more than 200 sites in California, Arizona and Florida— three states with anti-same-sex marriage initiatives on their ballots in November—a handful of nationally known conservative evangelical Christian leaders were tossing around terms like Armageddon and a “blitzkrieg moment.” Pastors in San Diego, the city that has been dubbed “the g…
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…hey still cared for me. And I can’t tell you how many times I remember the phone call she made and the letter he sent. To the rest of you, those I potlucked with, laughed with, held your hands, loved your babies, went to your weddings, your sickbeds, your moments of crisis: Where are you? Why have you let me go to what you believe to be perdition? Are you just too busy? Did I never matter that much? Have I fooled myself believing we were bonded fo…
Read More…e same way it does regarding slavery, or viewing women as property, or any number of things that our culture no longer affirms or 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 es…
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…lt, particularly since the church wouldn’t leave me alone. (I got repeated phone calls, letters, and visits to my home from missionaries and people in the congregation, despite formal requests that they stop.) Eventually I sought a community of people also striving to come to terms with what it meant to have been but no longer be a devout Mormon. Luckily a diverse community of ex-, post-, or lapsed Mormons (we differ on what to call ourselves) thr…
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…eet project is part of the same effort. “We are persistent,” he told me by phone, “because these stories have a real impact on people.” Telling stories grounded in real Arab-American history is the only way to reach understanding. And understanding is still sorely needed. One imagines what the Islamophobic activists who conjured the “Ground Zero Mosque” debacle a couple years back would do with the news of an Arab neighborhood in the shadow of the…
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