Religion Dispatches
…or celebrity status. The Orlando nightclub shooter reportedly checked his phone for news about the shooting during the actual event; the man who murdered hostages at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store in Paris last year filmed the attack on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous consequences—but you feel complicit, somehow, when you pa…
Read More…Jewish heritage of my wife of 38 years,” he wrote in an email. Later in a phone interview, he said his wife was not a practicing Jew but “ethnically Jewish” because her maternal grandmother was a Jew. Of course, it is possible to express [insert flavor of bigotry here] even if you have friends, relatives, partners, or a spouse who identify as part of [group that is the target of that bigotry]. It’s a close cousin to the “some of my best friends a…
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…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
Read More…I’ve in the past called the “religion-industrial complex.” Those stacks of high-minded email petitions you see delivered to lawmakers’ 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 u…
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…n bed on Sunday morning, reading the news about the Orlando shooting on my phone. In the wake of the tragedy, I have found myself mostly at a loss for words, stuttering between anger and sadness. I can not fully describe what I was feeling and thinking that morning as I was getting ready to head over to the LA Pride parade—even as news came in of an arrest in Santa Monica, earlier in the day, of a heavily armed man who was supposedly en route to t…
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Early Sunday morning I woke up, my phone abuzz with news. Reading about the shooting in Orlando, worry and fright overcame me. Still in a semi-wake, semi-sleep, semi-dream state, I thought it was Charleston all over again. Emanuel AME redux. My partner saw my face and asked what had happened. We turned on the television to learn that a man named Omar Mateen had entered a popular gay nightclub on its “Latin Night.” Using an AR-15 assault rifle and…
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…ess time worrying about giving side-hugs, and more time worrying about the high rates of teen pregnancy in New York City and beyond? What would the world look like if we did not just invite homeless people to church, or revel in annual trips abroad to feed and take care of the poor, but addressed the growing housing and voting crises right here in our own backyard? What if we began talking about the increasing number of Black and Latino women, men…
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…We are having a struggle to get women as a part of the movement. One of my highest priorities for the campaign is to try to change that. You recently compared transhumanism to the LGBTQ movement, pointing to the overlapping desire for freedom of bodily expression. Isn’t there a difference, though, between LGBTQ advocates who argue for broadening our vision of embodying gender, and transhumanists who dream of totally escaping the body through virtu…
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I start my day like every Muslim does. By checking my phone. Breitbart, though, is hardly the first, second, or even third website I’ll check. Actually Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos’ “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the AltRight” might be the first Breitbart essay to have held my attention. But it did more than that. There’s always a few articles we come across, perhaps every month, that don’t just engage us, but force us to go bac…
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…ed under foot, when human rights are perverted in the presence of the Most High, when one’s case is subverted —does the Lord not see it? (Lam. 3:34-36) Why does the way of the guilty proposer? Why do all who are treacherous thrive? … Their course has been evil, and their might is not right. (Jer. 12:1b & 23:10b) The all-encompassing, oppressive ideology of Jeremiah’s day was lauded by the urban elite, the religious, the imperial superpowers and lo…
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