Religion Dispatches
…s. My elders often told us that the United States was the only true Muslim country, the only place that really lived up the those values. I believed that. I still do. While the anti-Muslim sentiment seems to be increasing in this country, in my neighborhood, I feel empathy and support. I wear my ONE MORE MUSLIM FOR PEACE T-shirt to pilates and people smile at me as they pass me on the street. My daughters feel proud to speak at a crowded, angry co…
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…n euros for the card to be activated for three days and to get three paper tickets. Up to the manuscript room, where I handed the ID card and one ticket to the clerk. She gave me a key to a locker, where I had to leave all my belongings except one pencil (not a pen, with which I could deface a manuscript) and a notebook. Reentering the reading room, I had to display my pencil and notebook to the clerk to get back my ID card and the ultimate prize:…
Read More…position that Jesus is the “son of God” proves that Jesus is actually “the sun;” that the word “gospel” is derived “from ‘God’s spell’ as in magic, hypnosis and delusion,” and that Peter is not the rock but the cock or penis of the Church. These nonsensical claims make the Ishtar/Easter argument seem sensible by comparison. These kinds of arguments are politically useful to anti-clerical movements like the French Revolution (and Lenin, who became…
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…whipped him. City laws mandated that black Christians worship only between sunrise and sunset. The disruptions of the American revolutionary era, when many slaves ran for freedom or fought for the British side, made the American whites in the region suspicious of independent black religious activity. Jonathan Bryan, Andrew’s owner, licensed Andrew Bryan to preach and vouched for him; after his master’s death Andrew Bryan won his freedom. Andrew Br…
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…over? I love the cover. It’s an image of a rainbow corona around a setting sun. The sun itself is partially obscured by clouds, but still high enough in the sky that it would hurt your eyes to look at it directly. The corona itself, of course, is a visual effect produced by refraction on the camera lens. It isn’t “really there,” but of course it’s produced by things that are “really there” (the sun and the camera lens). In any event, the symbolic…
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…the new astronomy posits the existence of a central sun, around which our sun and system of planets revolve. It was believed to require something on the order of 26,000 years for our solar system to complete its circuit, and in so doing, it passed through each region of the Zodiac. Since there are twelve zodiac zones, our solar system spends roughly 2,100 years in each zone, and each such period is deemed a cosmic Age or Dispensation. Now comes t…
Read More…uried in the pages of my small hand-held copy of the Qur’an, absorbing the sun and the radiance at the same time. Praying under the sun or in the verandah ceased to be an option. Praying in public, or on the borders of the private, outside the walls of the home, in the quad became an act of bad taste, or worse, a dangerously bold act. Wearing clothing that served as a kind of mobile hermitage for private remembrance was an option less desirable no…
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…arge part of the Great Plains, restored wildlife and built a system of over 800 state and county parks. They electrified an entire region of the country, bringing what had been America’s “Third World” up to 20th century standards. They created works of art, gave concerts, set up theaters throughout the country, ran nursery schools, served over 1.2 billion school lunches to needy children, gave immunizations, taught illiterate adults to read and wr…
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…In 1991, Operation Rescue invited anti-abortion activists from around the country to descend on Wichita for what they called The Summer of Mercy: protests that brought Wichita to a standstill for seven weeks as demonstrators blockaded Wichita’s abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which…
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…then it has to begin by tackling the question of land. Swampy, virgin, and cheap Canadians who tell stories about land in a public setting can no longer do so while ignoring that they (we) are treaty people—that Canadians live in nation-to-nation relations with Indigenous peoples. As treaty people, part of the responsibility of settlers is to know and tell stories that acknowledge Indigenous land is the very same territory that they also call home…
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