Religion Dispatches
…d five children. I was also pregnant but unsuccessful with delivery. I sometimes fasted while pregnant and sometimes while nursing because I made my own judgment on my capacity to do so. Those years when I could not fast, or those days when still menstruating when I could not fast were inevitably rolled into other days of menstruation, pregnancies, or nursing. Why is the double duty of women’s schedule not taken into consideration for reprieve? If…
Read More…raction, as Sarah Posner observed. And I argued here that that perhaps the time had come for a general retooling of religious progressive rhetoric to confront anti-state statism and call on Americans’ sense of responsibility to future generations. The jobs crisis debate is another opportunity to put religious and spiritual values like dignity, responsibility, and industry to work against shame-inducing political static. It’s time to go big on jo…
Read More
…graduated from Brigham Young University in 1964, having spent most of her time there, Harris-Perry says, writing articles about Mormon womanhood. Meanwhile, her father, whose great-great-grandmother was sold as a slave on a street corner in Richmond, Virginia, attended Howard University where he was “converted to Black nationalism” and shared a room with Stokely Carmichael. By the time her mother and father met in Seattle in the early 1970s, each…
Read More
…: the first time I prayed in Makkah! Alas, there was still an impasse. The best we could do by the time the final call for prayer was made was get out and join the prayer lines right along the side of the street. Yep, right along the side of the street, people put down their rugs and formed prayer lines! These lines would stretch further back from the kaabah and get thicker over the next week. By the time we got to our rooms it was past 7 a.m., on…
Read More…t movements westward. Nor did the jeremiad go away after the founding era. Time and time again, critics raised their voice in the name of founding American principles, lamenting the continuing obstacles standing in the way of their full realization, and calling Americans to reform their practices and claim the nation’s foundational promises. Frederick Douglass told an audience on July 4, 1852, that “[t]he principles contained in [the Declaration o…
Read More…nd Saudi Arabia. So why waste the energy? At stake in the outrage over the Time article is a religious identity constructed around the history of “The Burning Times” and a sympathy with the oppressed. In 1921, Margaret Murray published her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe, in which she asserted that witches had been practitioners of a pre-Christian goddess-centered religion that the Christian church attempted to systematically hunt down and d…
Read More
…t.” https://twitter.com/shaneclaiborne/status/963408143978987523 The first time I remember hearing Christians use that phrase, “we want to be known by what we are for, not by what we are against,” was in 2005. Back then, I was a 5-point Calvinist and loyal disciple of macho-hipster pastor, Mark Driscoll. That Sunday morning, he was addressing some low-level controversy that was brewing and reassuring the packed auditorium of young (mostly white) h…
Read More…of the time, while any type of medical professionals were used 12% of the time and OB/GYNs specifically only 3% of the time. This isn’t completely surprising, Patton told RD, since “the majority of news segments about contraception focus on it as a political and social issue, rather than a medical or public health issue.” But this framing is nonetheless important, according to Patton. “News media often say they don’t make news, they cover it, but…
Read More
…with the reality of the fanatical, anti-democratic, authoritarian—and sometimes fascist—plans of the GOP, they’ve shown up for democracy, every single time. Fascism is not an inevitability. Democracies can survive an authoritarian threat—but only if the majority shows up—at the polls, at protests, in discussions with friends, family, co-workers. The right-wing assault on democracy is meant to make us feel helpless, defeated, cynical. Keeping a de…
Read More
…clear direction. It tells us that this time is simultaneously not the real time, the meaningful time, but is nonetheless crucially on the brink of conversion into realness and importance. This is indexed not only on the pages of scripture but in our feelings themselves, now understood as an alternate reservoir of evidence or “proof.” The coexistence of this evidentiary mode of “religion” with those of other bodies of/in evidence seems to me to sig…
Read More