Religion Dispatches
…picked up quickly and loaded the dishwasher, I said yes. Then I checked my phone. Like many people, I keep it on silent unless I’m expecting a call, so I missed a called from my youngest daughter. Instead she left a text message. It read: “your hajj packgat came” (sic) I burst out crying. So much so that my other daughter came forward and said, “What’s wrong?!” I couldn’t speak. I just showed her the text message and cried and hugged her. To her c…
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…t announces congressional run LGBT activist Luis Larraín announced a bid for a seat in the Chilean House of Deputies; national elections will be held on November 19. Cambodia: Report on growing visibility of LGBT community “Cambodia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community is coming out with an assertion of unprecedented pride,” reports Voice of America, “in stark contrast to just five years ago when discrimination and bullying we…
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…ces will be framed: as communal or theological obligations? As sometimes-uncomfortable challenges to the status quo? Or as comforting practices that serve personal well-being? Shabbat can be all of these things at once, of course. But I do suspect that companies like Arq, the Brooklyn Jewish lifestyle startup, offer a kind of warning. On a day that is traditionally set aside from consumption, Arq’s guide to observing Shabbat offers, essentially, s…
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…as Robertson wrote on his Huffington Post blog about the incident, he was coming off a first day of the conference that was “filled with wonderful conversations with pastors of churches, large and small, which were eager to hear my story and I, theirs.” Robertson told RD that everyone affiliated with FIA had gone to great lengths to maintain warm, welcoming postures, and were not looking to be confrontational. Robertson says that he, Mitchell and…
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…le’s boosters promise that the town has enough bed-and-breakfasts and cell phone towers to transform the eclipse into a comfortable tourist experience, there is a fundamental strangeness to the whole affair that no amount of merchandizing can fully defang. That it’s hard to reduce the weirdness of things like the eclipse hasn’t stopped Hopkinsville from trying. More than a half-century ago, on Monday, August 22, 1955, news media around the country…
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…Montreal in August. A new international coalition, the Global LGBTQI Francophone Initiative” is in the process of coming together and working together “to end governmental and societal repression of sexual and gender minorities.” A U.S. vote against a United Nations resolution condemning the death penalty for “same-sex relations” and other acts provoked widespread outrage, leading U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley to tweet, “Fact: There was…
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…interact or cooperate with the mandate holder. While reiterating our firm commitment to combat different forms of violence and discrimination, we believe that the resolution establishing the mandate adopted by a margin vote is highly divisive. Moreover the introduction and imposition of controversial notions outside the internationally agreed human rights legal framework contradicts the fundamental universality and would lead to polarization. A t…
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…styles, but I admire them both and try to emulate them—Carroll’s rigor in composition, the care and precision with which he writes, his dry wit, and Pinker’s air of genial intelligence, the way in which he explains complex subject matter clearly and with good humor. I admire especially Carroll’s Reading Human Nature and Pinker’s The Blank Slate. I also think any writer—literary, non-fiction, academic, whatever—should read Stephen King’s On Writin…
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…therefore much more supportive of it. When Notre Dame was finally able to come down off its culture-war high horse and look at the facts, they realized that there was a perfectly acceptable compromise that would, in its words, recognize “the plurality of religious and other convictions among its employees” while allowing the university to officially state that it’s not providing contraceptives. Notre Dame and other Catholic organizations were her…
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…etween science and spirituality. The point of conflict would be presenting competing understandings; even within science you have competing theories. As the book shows, religion is extremely broad and so is spirituality. It’s not just one thing. I’m writing as a psychologist, and 90 percent of psychologists believe that religion is about the fear of death. Other than that they have a bribe theory on religion. Stay religious so you’ll live long or…
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