Religion Dispatches
…language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run…But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. The subte…
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…le. We are not supposed to consult the manuscripts together. Why? It’s the rules. The rules are very strict. I have an idea.” He got up. “I’ll try something.” He intercepted a different clerk, a young woman who had just come from a back room. She studied me, then curtly nodded. He hurried back and swept up the manuscript. “This way. I asked for special permission to talk.” We went into the back room, where a trio who looked like professor and stu…
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…ocratic politics. The fire in Israel clearly sparked that temptation. Arab newspapers and websites carried comments like “O Allah, burn them before the Day of Judgment,” “O Allah, destroy them and all the enemies of Islam,” and, condemning Arab governments that helped Israeli firefighters, “May Allah take revenge against them and displace them together with our corrupt governments.” Hamas occasionally echoes such ancient voices as it tries to make…
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…one of the tunnels by a policeman. We parked on the side of the road. The news was finally translated, we are not allowed to pass with our vehicle during the salah. This was about the point when I start to lose it. Oh yeah? well we want to pray too you know. But, while the driver said we could walk and then get our bags at the hotel, the man in the BMW said we might get lost. Get lost, how? We just follow the river of people, right to Bayt-Allah….
Read More…these elements all combine to make this a place of complete wetness. I’m trusting that it was mostly just water, but I erred here when I chose to bring my purse with my iPad, camera, and money and to leave my water bottle, shoes, and prayer rug as markers to my Iranian neighbors that I was returning. As it was, I did still find my space had been invaded a bit, mostly by the sleeping husband of the woman next to me, with whom I initially wanted to…
Read More…or the visa and how NOT being optimistic was driving me crazy. She said, “Trust in God and don’t worry.” She said, “You can’t have both: either it’s the trust or it’s the worry.” So I let go, for just a minute. Yesterday was magnanimous! It had been two weeks since the tour company received my passport by express mail when they told me I had to choose, apply for the visa or go to Berlin. They said then, the embassy says it will take 10-12 business…
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…ce and religion can be harmonized. He has every right to do this, and, if truth be known, I am much closer to Harris than to Collins on the matter of the truth-status of Christianity. Also, even though I think that science and religion can be harmonized, I am not sure that Collins shows this successfully. My objection is that in a book on the foundations of ethics it is simply out of place to spend so much time on such a personal attack. Perhaps H…
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…to say: “You can’t make me doubt Him. I know too much about Him.” And the truth is, that’s the way I feel. And it would have been very easy, because some of these people are very academic, you know, have… a great command of the English language, and Greek and Hebrew too… I love to tell these people that I’ve been to school too. And it’s disconcerting to them. And not because I know what I know, but because I really believe it, with all my heart. Y…
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…the Irgun leaders (future prime minister Menachem Begin among them) the struggle to create a Jewish state in Palestine justified the use of violence. The Herut Party, formed by the Irgun leadership, was condemned as a “terrorist” organization by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and others in a 1948 letter to the New York Times. The Stern Gang, which broke with the Irgun in 1940, went beyond justifying violence to privileging and extolling it. Revis…
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…e is one of surrender. We are also khalifah, or agent, representative and trustee. This is our relationship to Allah’s Jamal attributes or her rubbubiyyah. In this, our proper posture is active engagement in all aspects of life. This engagement should manifest our inner states of surrender (this is for all our actions, not just in worship or ibadah, but also in our mu’amalat). There’s a Sufi image of these two postures, like a ball, the top half f…
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