Religion Dispatches
…displaced native peoples and native geographies even as they created new places and place attachments. As part of becoming “native” to their new home, settlers freely appropriated from the people they just dispossessed. They bestowed pseudo-Indian place names and told fake Indian legends about those named landforms. Mount Timpanogos is one such storied place. Utah is a great case study for this historical dynamic because Mormonism, a religion ind…
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…a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia who quotes Proverbs, declares his love for God—and laments the recent breakup of his relationship with a boyfriend. They are all members or supporters of Soulforce, an organization that aims to change the hearts of those who use religion to justify discrimination against sexual minorities. Most of the 20-somethings in the crowd are participating in Soulforce’s Equality Ride, a semiannual event tha…
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…ewal, a language that drew on an ancient language to make it deeply new. A language of serious play that could, with a wink and a twirl, turn reality in a new direction and claim it was simply uncovering a meaning that was already there. A language of puns, serious and funny puns that took as cosmic teaching the clang of words and phrases with each other. And this, the rabbi taught me, was what my new Haggadah was already: a midrash on the ancient…
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…ost anyone. He was born in Hall, Indiana, four years before the Great War, later moving to the “big” town of Martinsville, population 4,800. So Coach knew the rural life. In 1948 he moved to Los Angeles where he would live for the rest of his life. As a part of the great migration from the rural Midwest to the urban West, he could sympathize with both urban and rural concerns. Basketball, of course, was common to both, played with equal fervor by…
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…portantly, the relationship between the gang and the church mirrored the relationship between churches and people in favelas. There was mutual respect, which was essential to preserving the peace. Gang members could leave the gang and join the church as long as their participation was deemed genuine. It would be very difficult to fake a conversion in prison because someone’s observing your actions 24 hours a day. For example, if someone converted…
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…hich temporarily overturned marriage equality in California. They made similar million-dollar plus contributions to campaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA comme…
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…lso made—disquietedly—by rabbis who take issue with JVP’s positions. Some place at least part of the blame on the establishment’s “litmus tests,” which result in too few communal spaces in which Jews feel comfortable or welcome voicing criticisms of Israel. Rabbi Brian Walt, the founding executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, and now part-time rabbi for Congregation Tikkun v’Or, a Reform synagogue in Ithaca, New York, sits on…
Read More…d I say was declined), individually I did it with my neighbor. A few other ladies came later to tell me they had also done it in smaller groups. This inability to organize ourselves into a group affected everything we did from then until departure. I compared notes with others on hajj, in other locations in the camps and after. Some had more of something that resembled a group experience enhancing the individual experiences. I think it would have…
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…images are much easier now, at least for the middle class that can afford plane tickets to Medjugorje and Civitavecchia. Pilgrims learn from major apparition sites exactly how to watch for the Virgin and what to do when someone spots her. And it’s much easier for the news of an apparition to reach reporters, now that visionaries and their witnesses use video cameras and the World Wide Web. President Obama made the news last week when he made a pil…
Read More…on the Obama website of the Catholic National Advisory Council, and after plac[ing] three phone calls to his campaign … we were told … that someone would get back to us, but no one did.” Donohue noted that he “personally e-mailed [Mark] Linton [Obama’s National Catholic Outreach Coordinator] informing him of the three phone calls, requesting that he respond to my question: ‘I would like to know whether the Catholic National Advisory Council for Se…
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