Religion Dispatches
…franchise has been its eerie habit of taking the barometer of its times (often the best of its times), and of pointing a way forward. It showed the first interracial kiss on American television, and it invented the flip-phone. I hope, for our sake, that Star Trek has finally gotten out of touch….
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…ect of both personal and corporate prayer. When he speaks to his mother by phone from Libya, she asks if he has felt the prayers coming from his home as well. He tells her that he has felt them and reports, “Maybe it was others’ prayers strengthening me, keeping me afloat.” This is precisely the kind of hope that prayer can inspire that should become central to the understanding of it for those of us who do not engage in prayer. Though the old aph…
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…rough years of conversations, we made it, song by song, through the entire American Beauty album. Steve passed away in June of this year. That was 15 years after our “Ripple” conversation, and today, there are hundreds of Dead songs on my phone and dozens of live recordings in playlists, even a nod when I see a Deadhead sticker on a car. I am a relapsed Catholic, and thanks to my friend, I am also a repentant Deadhead. Dear Jesus, let me confess:…
Read More…ffington Post, counts eleven ways the global LGBT community has helped the American LGBT movement. Catholic Church: Swiss priest sacked for blessing lesbian couple; LGBT advocates begin pilgrimage Wendelin Bucheli, a Swiss priest, was dismissed from his parish post by Bishop Vitus Huonder after Bucheli blessed a lesbian couple in a ceremony that reportedly did “not differ very much from a wedding.” Huonder’s spokesperson told Swiss newspaper NZZ a…
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…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships. A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…
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…ion has a strange way of inspiring reflection on personal property. On the phone, I told my mom, “I love your house. It is so perfect for you.” And I do. I love her house not because I grew up there (I did not) or because I’ve spent much time there (I’ve only visited once) or because of anything to do with the way it looks. I love her house because of what it stands for. It’s a symbol of her freedom. Freedom from every man who raised a hand to her…
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…a nonprofit that creates unconventional Jewish programming, including an iPhone app designed to help people disconnect and unwind on Friday afternoons. The organization has a simple, ten-principle Sabbath Manifesto that’s “designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world” by giving people a “provisional guide to observing a weekly day of rest.” (Manifesto principles include “Avoid technology,” “Get outside,” and “Drink wine.”) Reboot a…
Read More…anization for Marriage (NOM) urgently called on its supporters to get more phone calls into Senate offices. NOM is urging Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos to use his power to keep marriage from coming to the floor for a vote. Meanwhile, Archbishop Timothy Dolan is getting increasingly shrill in his efforts to stop the shift toward equality. This week, on his official blog, he wrote: “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in N…
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…ued until nightfall. They continued until counselors and nuns in habits outnumbered wild-eyed parents. Then some guy came over and asked for identifying information about their children—jewelry, tattoos, dental records. Two women went outside and threw up. A man who was shot while watching the premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado this July remembers that he was sitting in the fifth row of the theater. When the theater filled with s…
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…es. In many ways, it sets the stage for and goes beyond the open letter to American Muslims published by Reza Aslan and Hassan Minhaj here on RD. According to the ISPU report, there is a deep desire by American Muslims to return to a religious imagination that isn’t bounded by simple legal edicts, but which calls forth the best of a person through a Prophetic example. As a result, one can no longer see mosques operating in isolation from American…
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