Religion Dispatches
…aw this morning, and now returning back to the coincidence, a story on Fox News: “Lindsay Lohan converts to Islam?” The best way I can describe Fox News is that it is the white Christian version of the propagandistic hate, from language to technique, I see coming from the worst corners of the Muslim world. They’re the Mean Girls of our global high school. They deserve one another. But they’re not the adults in the room. So what if you carried a Qu…
Read More…r thing to… do whatever Rep. Kelly thinks he’s doing. I give up. Here, have a video about Basenjis freaking out when a phone rings:…
Read More…e a caucus proposed a stop fracking resolution. We spent hours on national phone calls debating when fracking should be stopped. We finally proposed 2030 as the last fracking date. It was a compromise after many “brackets,” what COP21 calls the matters that are kept in that famous parking lot where we put the things we don’t know how to decide. The Synod amended our so-called radical proposal and unanimously passed 2017 as the final date. We were…
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…c folks—he made them a deal. It was very straightforward. It was like, he knew they knew that he was not the kind of Christian they have always said America needed. He said, “I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you the Supreme Court you want, I’ll do away with the Johnson amendment to make you more politically powerful. I’ll give you Mike Pence as a vice president. I’ll make abortion illegal. I’ll do all that for you.” And they took the deal. T…
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…obal pandemic was probably not the ideal timing for a release date. It’s a newish twist on an old narrative: bad religion and bad media make us bad. But the problems posed by simulation theory are not new ones—we’ve never shared a cohesive reality. Worldviews, structural systems, lived consequences—these have always been unevenly felt. And so the binary of my mattering and your not collapses into another one: I’m in the real world, and you’re not….
Read More…erks around New York State are gearing up for a busy Sunday as the state’s new marriage equality law goes into effect. The state is expecting such a flood of same-sex applicants that day that New York City has even implemented a lottery for 764 slots for Sunday. Two clerks who won’t be busy will be Rosemary Centi of Guilderland and Laura Fotusky of Barker. Both women have quit their jobs, saying granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples viola…
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…graphical is the feeling of alienation; of being Jewish when you’re not in New York. Because some of the things I experienced in different countries, like these characters did, where, when you leave your enclaves, like New York and L.A., and you go to places like London or Warsaw, it’s still kind of weird to be Jewish. It’s just not that big of a deal in a lot of cities in America. But when you go abroad, you realize it’s a different thing to be….
Read More…ost to real crime prevention, and the ways in which the NYPD is arrogating new powers for itself that jeopardize the freedom of all New Yorkers. Take this passage on page 10, for example: [W]here the NYPD was spying in Arab neighborhoods with sizeable populations of Syrian Jews and Egyptian Christians, the intelligence unit explicitly focused on the Muslim populations. The surveillance was going on at a time when a (non-Muslim) Syrian community in…
Read More…ms of violence are to be appreciated more than others. If the words of Fox News can lead to an arson attack against a mosque, and general Islamophobia results in knifings in pizzerias, then the words and actions of the Mayor of New York have a much more profound impact. Muslims in the city are bombarded by media coverage that paints us as suspect. The city’s police department paints us as suspect. Advertising in the veins of the city paints us as…
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…mportance of secrecy seems to be paramount for the IFTCC. Indeed, a recent newsletter to registered members warns: We would like to remind you, in order to ensure a safe and secure environment for everybody, the conference will be non-public and by invitation only. Please DO NOT post this information on any website, nor on social media. The new registration form reads: “If this is your first time at the conference, please provide a person known to…
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