Religion Dispatches
…ad flooded the city was astronomical. The roommate and I often opted for joining prayer lines out on the street, rather than to fight with the crowds for the Haram mosque at this point. That is, unless we planned ahead by at least an hour. They said the Saudi government had allowed five million this year. I don’t know where the information comes from and besides, can one individual actually tell the difference between the three million norm and a…
Read More
…ers of divorce and abortion, and the evils of consumerism. After World War II, the Virgin went global. Since 1945, at least 700 apparitions have been reported, according to the count of anthropologist Paolo Apolito, the majority of them in North America. Most of those occurred after the apparition in Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina (beginning in 1981) had begun luring millions of pilgrims from every corner of Christendom, who then returned home to…
Read MoreSEATTLE – Members of Washington United for Marriage, the coalition working to keep the state’s new gay marriage law on the books by coaxing voters to approve Referendum 74 this fall, have a clear mission: to move people of faith. Four years ago, they watched in horror and disbelief as California’s marriage equality law was repealed by Proposition 8, aided by the money of religious conservatives, much of which came from outside the state. Washingt…
Read More
…pes that have been central to US foreign policy since the end of World War II. In opposition to Europe’s violent colonialism, Americans preferred to think of themselves as practicing a “benevolent supremacy.” As this idea circulated in media productions and other cultural texts, a national public increasingly understood US interventionism as a courageous, even self-sacrificial, project to protect global freedom. Meanwhile, however, the US found a…
Read More
…ward national trend in this week’s midterm elections. The victory of Proposition 47, for example, makes California the first state in the nation to “de-felonize” drug use. This sentencing-reduction measure won 60 percent of the vote and united a surprising array of supporters, including a conservative evangelical Christian billionaire whose advocacy for criminal justice reform attracted the attention of “some of his friends on the left.” Another s…
Read MoreOn June 28th, highly regarded and popular religion writer Jonathan Merritt posted a letter to his website informing readers that he would no longer be writing for Religion News Service. As Sarah Jones recently reported in the New Republic, the 84-year-old wire service has been undergoing what many insiders see as a “spectacular implosion,” with editor Jerome Socolosky being fired in an email by publisher Tom Gallagher, and veteran reporters Kimbe…
Read More
…athering was “protected” by heavily-armed men, including infamous “Vanilla ISIS” terrorist Ammon Bundy, a Mormon anti-government extremist who led the occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Having failed to gain the backing of the state GOP apparatus or of any state senators, the small group of extremist legislators ultimately admitted that they did not have a quorum. Nevertheless, they grandstanded and read the proclamat…
Read More…paign appointed a Catholic National Advisory Council—made up of elected officials, scholars, and activists and co-chaired by Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and several others—to reach out to Catholic voters. Less than a month later, Bill Donohue, the president of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (and a notorious opponent of progressive causes) called on the Obama c…
Read More
…lking around with the Pope in my pocket. Released in late May, the H2Onews iPhone app is the first news application approved by the Vatican. With a touch of my phone I can now get excerpts from the sermons of his Holiness, news from the Vatican, and even the Sunday Gospel. Sporting a sleek interface and a choice of eight languages, the Pontiff has gone 2.0. This might sound like the Vatican is out on the cutting edge, but H2Onews was actually a li…
Read More
…al of nerds, a math class gimmick, a chance to pause and reflect on the infinite, or just a good excuse to eat a lot of sugar. For these and many other reasons people around the world have taken March 14th to ponder geometry’s most popular constant. Pi (π), a number used to measure the circumference of circles, is approximately 3.1415. I say approximately because pi is a transcendental number, meaning that its decimal digits actually go on forever…
Read More