Religion Dispatches
…ns who are pressing for Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount: Tensions at the site have been escalating as some Israeli lawmakers have stepped up provocations to reverse the long-standing ban on Jewish prayer there, once considered a fringe position but now a growing rallying cry on the Israeli right. No Israeli prime minister since the war of June 1967, when the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem began — including stalwarts Menachem Begin, Ariel S…
Read More…an exorcism by Archbishop Paul S. Coakley. Oklahoma City has also been the site of an ongoing controversy as The Satanic Temple (a different Satanic group) has campaigned to erect a monument to Satan on the grounds of the state capital to complement the current monument of the Ten Commandments. After Michael Tate Reed II rammed his car into the Ten Commandments monument on October 24, shattering it, the Satanic Temple released a statement condemni…
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…me a long time and I hope that my regret for the long journey is clearly communicated in the book. I am sorry it took me so long to put it all together. It’s like being in a movie where someone is trying to crack a safe and there’s six numbers and you have to get all six numbers right for the safe to open. I think that’s what’s happened for me. Finally, all six numbers came up and I was able to open the safe and I could see this in a new way. Tha…
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…of real estate in the world. The decades-long arrangement under which the site was administered by a special trust in Jordan is coming unglued under unrelenting pressure by ultra-orthodox Jews who want to see a Third Temple erected there. Leading Israeli politicians pander to these pressures, making their own provocative statements. Worse, these same politicians backed versions of a proposed nationality law—hugely controversial in Israel and amon…
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…ed that the opposition was based on inaccurate information found on one website, discoverthenetworks.org, a product of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The site is still in operation today. This experience was my wake-up call that right-wing Jewish organizations are using our campuses to promote a specific political narrative about Israel and Palestine, using threats, intimidation and donor monies to further their goals. At the beginning of this…
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…ry popular culture defies the ability to locate any cultural object at one site or sites. And in the case of postural yoga, we cannot locate it in my chosen sites alone. However, as a practical move, this study uses them as windows into the incalculable sites of the construction, dissemination, and practice of yoga. I had to carefully select from case studies in my effort to demonstrate that the postural practice we most associate with yoga today…
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…mes blatantly. The Christian Post, a conservative evangelical on-line news site that claims non-alignment but leans heavily right, has given the story heavy coverage. In one of its articles CP linked Cook to Gene Robinson and to other Episcopal Bishops–including a dead one–with alcohol problems. (Robinson went to rehab during his episcopacy). An editorial that ran on the website of the American Anglican Council called the incident “[s]ad for the E…
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…nnouncement, in all the years I have been looking at the listings. The AJS site has traditionally listed academic jobs and, maybe, the odd announcement for a non-academic position in the organization itself. That there was a job announcement for a Hillel ED disturbed me. Is this the new norm? It seemed to me to be a muddying of the already blurry line between Hillel and Jewish Studies—a border that I have watched with growing concern. Hillel is en…
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…symbol of the gateway to the west; that and the surrounding park is on the site of a former large African American community. The slum clearance not only built the Gateway Arch, it built university extensions, highway interchanges to bring the new suburbanites to their jobs in the downtown area, and the clearance programs forced African Americans out of their previous neighborhoods in the central city. In some cases they were given federal voucher…
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…its snack bar,” according to Schuller’s biography on the Hour of Power website. “One hundred persons attended that first Sunday, all in their cars. Dr. Schuller, who believe[d] this outdoor ministry experience helped inspire him to later build the all-glass Crystal Cathedral, often state[d], ‘It was there I fell in love with the sky!’” Interior of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif, 2005. Image via Wiki Commons. Schuller’s congregation…
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