Religion Dispatches
…de of the road with a flat tire, or a broken down car, that help is just a phone call away. It also gives me discounts on lodging and other perks. My partner has a gold card with her name on it as well. The account number on both cards is the same. Years ago, when we signed up for the cards with the venerable roadside assistance company AAA, the woman at the counter smiled sweetly and never blinked an eye when we asked for the “family” plan. We we…
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…explains Linda Hanick, Trinity’s VP of communications and marketing, “the last words of Jesus are almost written in tweets, less than 140 characters.” Okay, so maybe they’re a match made in heaven. It all got going around 12:10 p.m. on Friday, ten minutes late, after some technical troubles. The first post: “via @ServingGirl: is so tired. Caiaphas and the priests have been up all night questioning a man who claims to be the Messiah. And I wait on…
Read More…d on her way to work. Then she went to bed, coughed once, and breathed her last breath. She was 44 years old. I knew she had an enlarged heart but even a death certificate concluding “natural” causes could not alleviate the tragedy it was for me. I mention this because while I had already made my intentions to make hajj, the cost would have just about wiped out my little savings, which I ended up using to pay for most of her funeral expenses. Then…
Read More…f compassionate immigration reform. How has that impacted your work? I get phone calls from LDS people who would identify themselves as politically conservative, but they say, “There’s this guy I know . . . Can you help him? He’s a really good guy.” People need to remember that there are many “really good guys” out there waiting for immigration reform. People coming to the US for work get villainized. “Illegal alien” is one of the most unbelieva…
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…s who are willing to pay for that kind of caring individual attention. The last really good primary care doctor I had (a member of a small group practice serving mainly gay men in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood) ended up quitting the profession in disgust over how little time he was permitted to spend with individual patients. Brilliant and idealistic, he found himself pushing paper (insurance forms) and pushing lots of pills but not actually pra…
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…ion of a unified Reich. The German word for “empire,” Reich can refer to a number of entities, the most common association today being Nazi Germany, which referred to itself as the “Third Reich”—following the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and Imperial Germany. The video’s reference to the Reich, as the Associated Press has reported, seems to have been taken verbatim from a Wikipedia entry on World War I: German industrial strength and pro…
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…ing a violent attack close up. The horrifying footage shows the dictator’s last moments, complete with flashes of faces splattered with blood, punctuated with off-screen shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” and revealing glimpses of Qaddafi’s pummeled and resigned visage blunted by repeated beatings. While the footage itself seems to bleed with the desperation and anger of a people who have felt powerless for too long, from the gamer’s perspective, this is m…
Read More…eteorite? Bomb? End of the world? We were freaked out. No television, cell phone, internet service. There was no way to find out what happened. Later that night, in the Mayan village, the men gathered outside our hut, talking about it in hushed voices. Lacking any better answers, my husband offered the theory that perhaps it was from aliens. We learned the source of the explosion the next morning. At 8:59, the space shuttle, taking a detour due to…
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…ation / Emanuel’s Pulse, a “pneumatic pact“ In Charleston and now Orlando, last year was this year’s future. Church and nightclub, sanctuaries of the Sacred, places for the celebration of (the) mass(es). Life’s (w)holiness, notwithstanding the bullet holes now in it. With vigilance, hold vigil with me. We know that neither Christianity nor Islam are reducible to the violence perpetrated in their names. Just as we didn’t reduce Christianity to Dyla…
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…less it’s real. The problems are not just administrative: Ahmadis have a “glass ceiling” in the civil service, and discriminatory use of voter registration lists (Ahmadis are enrolled separately) keeps them from participation in elected government, even in areas where they are the overwhelming majority. From there it spreads through society in ways both perverse and corrupt, according to Ahmad: a non-Ahmadi colonel’s career is ended because his st…
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