Religion Dispatches
…s spate of apologies for America’s past behavior toward Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. But what he means is that his predecessor did wrong; it remains to be seen whether he finds himself capable of being culpable too. Save for the help of the Yes Men, the team of pranksters who apologized on the BBC for Dow Chemical’s role in the 1984 industrial disaster in Bhopal, corporate repentance has been even rarer. Apology is bad for business,…
Read More…By 2:30 we were soaked to the skin by a “sudden” thunderstorm headed northeast to the Hopi reservation. I remembered it was the day of the Hopi Snake dance which is most often cited as a “rain dance.” Snakes and rain are almost universal partners occurring in cultures from Eastern Europe to Chumash of Southern California. I’ve seen a lot of Chumash rock art and at almost every spring there is a painted figure with the familiar crosshatched markin…
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…people in the first two decades [of life] very rarely die of cancer or diabetes. They die of risk-taking and suicide, things like that. And there’s nothing in the medical sciences as robust and protective against the most serious forms of suffering and risk as a personal spirituality. There’s the term “spirituality,” as we use in ordinary conversation, which is fairly vague. But for research, you need to have the term locked down. How does our da…
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…w to terrorism. The earliest terrorist groups in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe were mostly secular nationalists. The most dangerous decade in terrorism, the 1970s, was dominated by groups like Weather Underground, the Japanese Red Army, and the Marxist Fadai’yan. In fact, until 2000, the majority of suicide bombings were carried out by the enthno-Marxist Tamil Tigers. Yet, regardless of the differing ideologies, the consistent…
Read More…odd thing to say to the press.) The rep also accused McDonald’s of “openly promoting gay issues” and miseducating children on sexual behavior. Shanghaiist quotes from a statement released by Chang Shou-yi, secretary general of the Alliance of Taiwan Religious Groups for the Protection of the Family: “Because McDonald’s is frequented by many children, it is especially important to oppose the promotion of same-sex behavior,” the statement added. As…
Read More…ified of him. The brothers never speak anymore; they talk on the phone at least once a day. It’s all there and it’s all unclear. All we know for a fact is that it all came apart very suddenly. On December 9, 2008, Bernie Madoff told his son, Mark, that he intended to pay out $173 million in holiday bonuses two months early. Deeply concerned, Mark revealed this to Andrew, who concluded that Madoff Securities should probably be re-named. The brother…
Read More…doing so, to comments my father used to make about turning various Middle East countries into parking lots by the use of nuclear devices. Hedges writes: Militarism crushes the capacity for moral autonomy and difference. It isolates us from each other. It has is logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and yes, our gay…
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…mmunion. He did so because he had come to feel a responsibility to those “least among us” who were not moving on a path toward acceptance in as straight a line as many in the late ’60s and early ’70s had hoped. But you also hear more than a subtle echo of what Matthew learned from Merton’s heterosexual torment. It remains true that given our national climate, it will take a while to let love loose. And then to let love grow, deeper, greater, wider…
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…more were made refugees. Caldwell makes no mention of any of this, nor of Eastern Europe’s ancient Muslim communities. There have been Eastern European Muslims for longer than Protestantism has existed, and yet Islam is still, centuries on, the Other; notable only as immigrant victimizer. As a public intellectual one might expect that he has some interest in another perspective, that he might give a holistic account… Caldwell’s Other Crisis Thoug…
Read More…ut does not pay him for his labor’” (Al-Bukhari). As part of its effort to promote its Shari’a-compliance certification, Mr. Harold Garrison, the Executive Director of HDG Mansur, attended at the Islamic Real Estate Finance Conference in London. So too did Rev. C.J. Hawking, the Indianapolis clergy organizer, and Sheik Abdool Khan, officially representing the Islamic Society of North America. They met with investors and Shari’a scholars to reitera…
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