Religion Dispatches
…tch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell phone and get in touch with them later today. Before the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I shou…
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…l known, despite major coverage in, among others, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Salon, and The New Republic. The rise of the NAR, and the growth of the wider charismatic movement, has come largely at the expense of traditional mainline Protestant and evangelical denominations, as well as Roman Catholicism, in favor of non-denominational churches and prayer networks. Andre Gagne and I recently reported on RD: These prayer networks are led by…
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…s by the post-Mexican Revolution government to impose anticlerical laws. A New York Times review described the movie’s characters as “clear-cut saints and sinners.” Like the Cristeros fighting against the Mexican lay state, WCF members see their battle as one of religious freedom against an oppressive state bent on forcing them to reject their values and accept a secular, relativist one. While WCF participants make the case that they’re being deni…
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…ublished under the Hay House imprint. In a perceptive 2008 profile for the New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer wrote that we all “live in Louise Hay’s world,” though we may not know it. For example, the practice of writing out and reciting a set of sunny “affirmations,” in the expectation that doing so will somehow transform your life, owes its ubiquity to Louise Hay. Without a Louise Hay—and I suppose without an Oprah Winfrey—there would be…
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…anced by well-intentioned supporters. My Catholic high school in Syracuse, New York was forbidden by the diocese to host her in the late 1960s. Being domesticated in death by a church that fails to appreciate one in life is distasteful. Attention to John McNeill and his ministry is a powerful antidote to much of the holy hoopla of the papal visit. Brendan Fay captured the contours of John’s life in a fine film, “Taking a Chance on God.” John found…
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…efused to recognize an undergraduate Pride Alliance group, YU claimed that New York State laws that require it to do so encroach upon its religious liberty. But YU would do well to proceed with caution. If the university wins this battle, which seems likely, the university may help deal a hard blow to the very cause YU claims to hold dear: a historically persecuted religious minority’s right to self-determination in a democratic society. Far from…
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…but the signal is strong. Today, her mission is to destroy; her target is New York. “I am especially pissed off at the state of New York!” Its crime: the release of the illegal, “this monster,” who went to Georgia and killed “our girl,” Laken Riley. Therefore, New York’s courts have no standing: They dispatch brown-skinned killers (he was released after an arrest for operating a car dangerously with a child) to murder pretty White girls and yet c…
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…much nicer man than Cardinal Edward Egan, his predecessor as archbishop of New York. And he certainly did smile a lot at the vespers, and sounded convincing when he thanked Pax Christi for inviting him. What I’ve been mulling over, though, is Archbishop Dolan’s sermon about Day, who, having spent most of her life in New York, often worshiped in the very church where we were singing vespers. And while Dolan said a number of things about Day in his…
Read More…every time somebody lately protests the building of a new mosque—either in New York City or in other cities across the country—they’re always careful to cloak their opposition with earnest assurances that they’re not opposed to religious freedom. But there is only one response to such an assertion: Yes…you…are. (And I’m talking to you, Anti-Defamation League). In a statement opposing New York City’s approval of the building of an Islamic center tw…
Read More…W. Bush. Checkmate.) Why should we focus on the sideshow, and not on what New York needs, and is being offered? So I stayed silent. Until I read Maureen Dowd’s Sunday New York Times column, that is. In it, she ascribes Abedin’s (unfathomable) fidelity to her husband, Anthony Weiner, who is the father of their child to—and here it comes, the very insight you paid through the paywall for—her Saudi Arabian upbringing, for that is where women are op…
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