Religion Dispatches
…ass. A stranger, upon learning that I don’t have one of the highly-coveted tickets to the Sunday Conference sessions, spontaneously offers me his last extra. Mitt Romney would blend right in amongst the crowds here. But so would Marco Rubio. Or Antonio Villaraigosa. Or any clean-cut man in a white shirt and tie, any woman in Sunday dress with a baby stroller. I try to strike up a conversation with an African woman dressed in a pagne. “Where are yo…
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…s 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 pilgrima…
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…in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, reading relatively static documents, and emailing acquaintances. By 2004, the year before John Paul died, search engines had become sophisticated and powerful, and the immensely popular online world Second Life was in its third year. MySpace had appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube was ju…
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…presentatives turned away nearly two hundred Mormon women seeking stand-by tickets to a restricted men’s-only session of the faith’s semi-annual global conference. Mormon women travelled from as far away as New York, Florida, and Germany to take part in the collective action organized by the group Ordain Women as a gentle and symbolic demonstration against pervasive gender segregation in LDS Church administration and leadership. All observant men…
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…n euros for the card to be activated for three days and to get three paper tickets. Up to the manuscript room, where I handed the ID card and one ticket to the clerk. She gave me a key to a locker, where I had to leave all my belongings except one pencil (not a pen, with which I could deface a manuscript) and a notebook. Reentering the reading room, I had to display my pencil and notebook to the clerk to get back my ID card and the ultimate prize:…
Read More…evelopers of approved projects the sales tax paid by visitors on admission tickets, food, gift sales and lodging costs. Developers have 10 years to reach the 25 percent threshold. Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, says there are concerns over the project, but it’s too early to tell whether the proposed business incentives would be unconstitutional in that it would involve excessive entanglement with r…
Read More…of protest is to wear the niqab and nothing else. Then, the women will get tickets, not for being nude, but for being clothed. In my opinion, that would show the absolute absurdity of the state trying to control women’s dress. I have written elsewhere that this sort of action, of controlling a woman’s body, is simply male penis worship run amok. These ladies, who call themselves Niqabitches, have done a great service in showing the inherent contra…
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…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…
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…ized family—albeit one with a healthy profit margin. Accordingly, it’s not cheap. A package of 50 classes in the Hamptons (which includes early class signups) runs for $4,000. New York magazine interviewed one New York City rider who, by the magazine’s estimate, was spending more than $21,000 on SoulCycle each year. A single class, sans early sign-up perks, costs nearly as much as a month-long membership at my local YMCA. Meanwhile, back on SoulCy…
Read More…is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his pouch. Now, there being a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow, it follows (so Mr. Pecksniff, and only such admirable men, w…
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