Religion Dispatches
…w are you going to announce it over social media if you don’t have a smart phone? And smartphones: they are helpful, but they are also limited. I’m working with some of my guides to develop what’s called a WisePhone, and it’s smarter than a smartphone. What are some of the features of the WisePhone? You won’t lose it anymore because it won’t be influenced by gravity, so it won’t fall down the cracks of your couch. It will also be able to tweet or…
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…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…
Read More…used to receive threats but in recent years they had grown to an enormous number. My public activities resulted in promises to hunt me down, beat me up, and kill me. Neo-Nazis, homophobes and pro-Putin agitators showered me with insults on social networks, harassed me on the phone and at events, and even complained to my place of work. On 24 August 2014, Ukrainian Independence Day, myself and some friends who were in a picket on Malaya Sadovaya s…
Read More…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…
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…ghlighted the irony of a childless man scolding those without children. My phone went wild with calls from animal lovers, queer friends and childless Catholic couples as well. An estimated 1.1 billion people belong to the Roman Catholic church. But even many of those who aren’t Catholic consider the pope’s words influential or have concerns about how his words can affect cultures, laws, and policies. I understood why they were dismayed. As an inte…
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…k millennials ages 18-29 comprise 20% of historically black churches. This number is roughly comparable to that of the baby boomer generation. Thus, religious affiliation for young black adults does not show the same kind of downward shift as that of the non-black population (the data on black children in the generation after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). African Americans in general, and African-American women in pa…
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…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …
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…A software engineer from Singapore, Tan joined Google in 2000 as employee number 107. He later founded the company’s in-house meditation program and became one of corporate mindfulness’ most visible advocates. Though Tan left Google six months ago, his final official job title at the company still doubles as his nickname: Jolly Good Fellow. Over the course of two phone conversations, RD asked Tan—who was, in fact, quite jolly—if mindfulness is a…
Read More…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
Read More…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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