Religion Dispatches
…cuation zone—but offered no easy solution. * Almost a week after Hurricane Sandy I know the neighborhood much better than before. Sheens remained open throughout four days of no power and sold us batteries and cigarettes; they were expensive, but they were there. The owner of the Italian restaurant downstairs who lost five large freezers full of food when rising ground water swamped his basement loaned me his phone. At the bar of a French restau…
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…ld. In the past decade, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse, News of the World phone-hacking, and Wikileaks scandals have marked new, and only very incompletely explored, ethical territory as we sort out the best ways to balance personal privacy and public safety as these are impacted by our engagement with new media. But even given difficulties defining necessary and appropriate boundaries of personal, professional, and institutional transparency, we…
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…hing of what the victims and the parents of the victims of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School now have. Every horror is utterly, terribly unique, but there are universals. In a super white, super loud flash… or a DJ’s croon… or a telephone’s brrng brrng, when you become forever lonesome. Because you know the real secret. Anything can happen. Aliens could land. *** Among the outrages of living in a time of violence is that victims feel t…
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…rs—but religion is doubtless part of the story. You can’t kill tens of thousands and rape thousands on the basis of their religion, and claim religion has nothing to do with it. One does not slaughter a people until one has hated them sufficiently to go from seeing them as individuals to seeing them as a mass to be done away with. And that hate is Islamophobia. Fears of “creeping Shari’ah”—the manufactured fear Islamophobes haunt America with, too…
Read More…ng of the country.” In 2010, the White House refused to comment on DuBois’ phone call to religious right ideologue David Jeremiah after the latter called the president “a dangerous person” moving the country toward “socialism.” It was obviously an incident the White House would have preferred DuBois just let go. Boorstein’s piece suggests that some critics believe that the office would have performed better had DuBois been more experienced and the…
Read More…ce at winning, given the state’s Democratic leanings and promising polling numbers. O’Malley said that expansive religious freedom language in the law was important to its passage and in keeping with the traditions of the state of Maryland. The referendum language makes clear that the law protects clergy from having to perform any ceremony that violates their beliefs, guarantees each faith control over its marriage doctrine, and “provides that rel…
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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…
Read More…ot. After that, he stayed more often after class, one day whipping out his phone to show me a photo of a white supremacist leader standing up in a convertible during what was obviously a white pride parade. The red-faced, fist waving man in the picture was flanked by two little girls sitting in the back seat, arms crossed with very pronounced frowns on their faces. “They don’t look all that happy,” I remarked to my student. “Those are my daughters…
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…ceration. I’m calling for a Christianity that no longer provides religious sanction or the cloak of righteousness to the political project of U.S. sovereignty and its vision of who is normal (and in the right place) and who is abnormal (and thus out of place). I’m calling for a Christianity whose animating logic is no longer tied to that false “god-man.” The “god” of (or that is) whiteness is a god toward which we must be thoroughgoing atheists an…
Read More…l was conducted by TNS, an independent research firm which conducts weekly phone polls, according to a Republicans for Choice press release. The poll asked, regardless of respondents’ personal feelings about abortion, whether “the woman, family, and her doctor [should] make the decision or the government [should] make the decision.” Seventy-one percent of self-identified Republicans said they “strongly” felt that the woman, her family, and her doc…
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