Religion Dispatches
…—but that will in no way reduce the sadness I will always feel when I look south on the anniversary of 9/11 and see the Tribute in Light where the World Trade Center once stood. As General Powell rightly said, there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim in this country. Being Muslim does not make me any less American. Haroon Moghul_________ How Far is it to Islam? We spent the first Monday evening of my senior year plastering every dorm we could…
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…freaked. I called my editor in a panic and told her there’s no way I could promote a book that made me so uncomfortable just to look at it. I told her it looked like gay erotica. She disagreed, saying she thought it was a warm and inviting cover. “But, see, you live in San Francisco,” I told her. “I live in South Carolina. In San Fran that may be warm and inviting, here, that’s called porn.” The only good thing was that the font had changed to wha…
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…x-Stripper: Priest is my baby’s father—and I want him to pay.” Before I go south and start to write this whole piece with quotes from songs (“That’s Just My Baby Daddy” comes to mind) I am struck with disgust about where the Catholic church, and lately Miami’s Archdiocese in particular, finds itself in matters of church discipline. Between the former Father Cutie and his recent marriage (props to him, at least he left and got married like a normal…
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…vative, in popular parlance) stance on religion. He associates mostly with South Asian immigrants, even going to Pakistan for a while, which, I believe, explains his ability to render the immigrant experience so well. He has a crisis of faith that happens as he learns about Shi’ism: I had been taught to revere that first generation. The Prophet had said that they would be the greatest Muslims of all time, seconded by the generation immediately aft…
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…en who will promote them over their progressive sisters can just as easily promote others over them. It is the power dynamic, not just the people, that is at issue here. Postmodern Catholicism is a different animal than its pre-Vatican II cousin. Catholics (women and men, lay and clerical, secular and religious) think for themselves, forming new syntheses of faith and solidarity. Nuns, perhaps more than many other Catholics, took the mandates of V…
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…e in Dogma, and Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty. On TV’s The Simpsons and South Park, God is satirically mocked as an old giant with robes and gray hair and a strange looking, insect-eating rodent, respectively. The smash sensation video game, God of War, is now in its third incarnation, showing once again how human glorification of violence often goes hand-in-hand with religious imagery and symbolism. Sometimes the most intense physical experien…
Read More…f one could not follow the language, as many in the audience could not. With continued shows like the one in New York, and Farooqi’s success in South Asia, he is well on his way to reviving this tradition….
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…students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on a tour of the South. We arranged a meeting with Moore, who is an engaging man with a good sense of humor. I found myself liking him, even though I consider his ideas and his antics dangerous. In the course of the conversation—a peroration, really—Moore did his schtick about our Christian nation and how the First Amendment protects the “free exercise” of only Christians and Jews because,…
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…in the world. However, the benefits of a frank reckoning with the past, so valuable in other post-conflict settings, exemplified by South Africa, surely apply here as well….
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…a–all in the name of morality. As someone who was raised in the Bible Belt South, in a deeply religious family, I was horrified by the religious right’s new distortion of Christianity and its deleterious impact on national and international health policy. I wanted to make sense of how the religious right had succeeded in redirecting the national terms of conversation about sex: spouting ugly homophobia, reshaming women’s sexuality in particular, i…
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