Religion Dispatches
…reason” condition. So, it’s best to be patient even if it is not to our liking or personal comfort. This is a pretty tall order, I have to be honest. So fortunately there are also more moderate responses throughout Muslim literature and lore. On the other side, in fact, is the Hadith or saying of the Prophet about “calling upon Allah” or making du’a, which is oh so sweet, “Allah loves to be asked…” I try to stay in a balance between the two: tawa…
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…f to be a secular Jesus follower, as I’m doing. The biggest challenge is making it real—not just some light, thin “nice idea,” but something that really confronts us and changes how we live our lives and treat other people. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? Two, mainly. One is the growing population of nonreligious people—especially those who are not so concerned about fighting religion and its excesses but who are pursuing a…
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…female churchgoing and religious belief are the highest in the nation — making African American communities the most unwaveringly religious in the U.S. At the same time, African American communities are among the most economically and racially disenfranchised; in the U.S., African Americans are still disproportionately poor, under-educated and over-incarcerated. Black incarceration rates and black homelessness parallel each other. And for all of…
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…ong and dance or whatever before they eat is just not dignified.” Jamaica: Kingston mayor joins first pride celebration Angela Brown-Burke, mayor of the capital city of Kingston and a member of the Jamaican senate, participated in opening ceremonies for city’s first-ever LGBT pride celebration last weekend, telling the Washington Blade, ““I come from the point of view that I, as mayor, have a responsibility to all the individuals of Kingston.” Hom…
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…oman who do not develop the sense of fatherhood or motherhood, they are lacking something, something fundamental, something important. Think about this, please.” He struck a chord, and people did think about it. Many, like The Cut’s Mia Mercado, highlighted 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 pe…
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…cause he has made his presence benignly ubiquitous. Rev. Warren is the new king of the evangelical hill, and this inaugural invocation is the crown. Warren may have a purpose, but it’s an old wine, rewrapped in a new fancy wineskin. If the invocation is about symbolism, rather than getting a prayer through, as a church mother would say, Warren as a symbol is a key to where the president elect wants to take the nation. Maybe the presidential plan i…
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…scuffed-up laminated pages. If it weren’t for a port-a-john next to the parking lot, the whole scene in this snow-covered countryside could be taking place in the 1950s, or even the 1880s, when the current chapel was first built. The Virgin Mary’s First Visit to the U.S. All this peace and quiet is about to disappear. On December 8, 2010, Bishop David L. Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay concluded a two-year investigation into the validity of the…
Read More…by the passage of immigration reform. To be sure, the religious right is making a serious play for them, as evidenced most recently by the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List’s California Latino voter education effort and the Vota Tus Valores campaign. But it’s curious that Grandin cites as his case in point for moveable Latino evangelicals the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Rodriguez, despite h…
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…ndeed, the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism’s co-authors, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Robert E. Buswell, Jr., have it right when they label the notion that “all Buddhists are pacifists” a misconception. The religion’s first ethical precept may be “do not kill,” but a whole host of scholars (including Sallie B. King, Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer, Tessa Bartholomeusz, Damien Keown, Brian Daizen Victoria, and Robert M. Bosco) have done much to…
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…razed by mobs in 1992—Madhav compared it to the longed-for restoration of King David’s Temple in Jerusalem, an idea championed by portions of the far-right Jewish and Christian Zionist movements today. Hungary: Against “liberal hegemony” Like so many others, Balázs Orbán, political advisor to Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), as well as the current chairman of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Prime Minister Orbán…
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