Religion Dispatches
…nt. Allah had said to those unseen creatures, the angels, “Inni Jaa’ilun fi-l-ard Khalifah: Indeed, I will create on the earth an agent, a khalifah”. I owe you an entry about what it means to be a khalifah in Islam, and maybe I will do it tomorrow, if no other interesting things befall me that I end up writing about instead. But the short version of it I hope you have followed: while we are responsible for our selves and called upon to do good act…
Read More…precinct upward; not from the Oval Office downward. There’s a verse in the New Testament which says, in which Christ is speaking to his Disciples, and he says, “He who is faithful in small things will be faithful in large things.” Before you want to be president, first learn how to do a good job on the school board. Reed, who in 2011 resurrected his checkered career with the now-influential Faith and Freedom Coalition, added that the Christian Coa…
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…this explanation given the recent history of the area: In September 2011, a 300-year-old Muslim shrine in Anuradhapura was destroyed. In April 2012, thousands forcibly entered a mosque in Dambulla and destroyed everything inside. In March 2013, a mob led by Buddhist monks attacked a series of Muslim owned businesses in the capital city of Colombo. In June 2014, several days of communal violence erupted after an altercation between a Buddhist monk…
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…opening to a speech that could only be made by an immensely privileged, out-of-touch individual. Biden went on to hit many notes that are alienating to secular Americans and much of the Democratic base, sacralizing American political life and calling for “unity” and “comity” with those who want to deprive the marginalized of their rights. Gushing over the NPB itself, Biden stated that he was “honored to continue the tradition started by President…
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…… about 95 marriage equality supporters marched in to the event to counter-protest NOM on a sidewalk across from the event. Impressive. Once again, NOM has been embarrassed on this tour, drawing significantly fewer supporters to their event than local marriage equality groups and organizations have assembled in response (and often on short notice). NOM wasn’t embarrassed by the low turnout of its previous rally in Lima, Ohio, touting on its blog,…
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…f us is getting out of here alive, and yet only one-third of us have an end-of-life care plan in place. My perspective on talking about that changed after graduating from Duke Divinity School, when I completed a post-graduate residency year in hospital clinical pastoral education (aka chaplaincy) with an unintended specialization in end-of-life care. I stumbled into death, dying, and grief; several months later, my supervisor wrote that I’d taken…
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…on of the center’s goals. The result is a Twitter feed that makes near anti-Semitic comments while claiming it’s trying to build bridges. It was only this week that an FAQ was released for the project, but not on the project website. The lack of clarity of mission reflects that lack of a consistent voice of leadership. When the controversy started in May, Feisal Abdul-Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative and his wife Daisy Khan of the American Society f…
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…ecent, with the shortest elapsed time between its powerfully fabulous faith-commanding nineteenth-century origins and the critical examination of those original truth claims in light of competing historical and scientific evidences. Only Mormonism has had its human flaws captured so openly and thoroughly in the historical record. This vulnerability has engendered avoidance and duplicity among LDS people who have felt obliged to defend the faith ag…
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…nkblot in a Rohrschach test. Everyone sees what they want to see. what any New Testament scholar claims to see tells us nothing for sure about the factual reality of Jesus. But it tells a lot about even the greatest scholar’s own presuppositions, worldview, values, and beliefs. Kal v’homer, as they say in Hebrew (“how much more so, then”): an Orthodox rabbi with few scholarly credentials and limited credibility in the academic world, who argues th…
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…on, because those are the matters that are causing greatest damage to inter-communal relations today. That means, regrettably, devoting attention to conflict—not just the ‘jihad and terrorism’ you mention, but also the harsh attitudes toward criminal justice, gender politics and religious toleration that have been hardening of late in some ostensibly Islamic states. Another writer might well have struck a different balance, but that would simply…
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