Religion Dispatches
…They were all white folks, mostly Italian-Americans, riding in cars and on cheaply-made floats, trying to create an air of excitement. But there was something sad, hollow, and strangely touching about it—as if they were trying too hard to whip up enthusiasm and regain a proud sense of identity. Security, Pride, Tranquility Many looked like they had just stepped out of the pages of a 1950s-era issue of Life magazine. I got a strong impression of pe…
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…g disastrous effects. Only in this case, the vehicle is the Qur’an, not an airplane. And the manipulation need only be virtual. Never has book burning been so effective without even occurring. Symbolic actions on the internet and their consequences in the real world now occur almost simultaneously. And the threat of a symbolic gesture and an actual one become one and the same. Let me go even one step further. One could even say that the suggestion…
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…called “Whirly Art.” I remember the first one I ever did was sitting on an airplane crossing the Atlantic on the back of a letter pad. I had a pencil, and I drew three horizontal lines, and that was the theme of the fugue. And I drew three horizontal lines higher up but to the right and that was the second voice entering. And then I drew some other stuff interacting with it, and I moved from left to right across the page, so the fugue was a very,…
Read More…all my family before I departed. So, I’m in a good place (not the airport/airplane—more on that perhaps another time.) Professor Ibrahim and I only go back a few years. He invited me to the Bay Area to give a public lecture; as it turned out, we immediately entered into the politics of Islamic Studies in America. I was one of several speakers, but I was going to be the one least paid. Thankfully my brother said uh-uh and we’ve been buds ever sinc…
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…years and feels that there is truly a problem of biology, that his aspect doesn’t correspond to what he or she feels is their sexual identity.” Francis replied that “Jesus surely doesn’t tell [people] to ‘go away because you are homosexual,’” and he elaborated on this point with a story of a trans Spanish man who had written the pope about his transition and how a neighborhood priest told him to “go to hell.” The pope said that stories like this…
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…ern in Chicago. I got arrested for counseling women about how to get on an airplane to New York to have a legal abortion. We don’t know why we were busted in the University of Chicago Divinity School Chapel basement. The whole idea of CCS was to remove the stigma of having an abortion and to bless it with the moral agency it deserves. We wanted to change the story from “you’re a bad girl” to “maybe you’re a good girl” if you control your reproduct…
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…exasperation with the coronavirus crisis, saying: “We’re all building the airplane as we fly it right now.” Whitmer has been under fire from liberals for caving to Republican pressure to clarify that religious organizations are exempted from restrictions on large gatherings in Michigan. While admonishing the public that staying home from church is best, Whitmer maintains that the constitutional principle of separation of church and state prevents…
Read More…ood. But if it is a strange thing that is not according to revelation … it doesn’t work. In the case of the diaconate, we have to see what was there at the beginning of revelation. If there was something, let it grow, let it live. If there was not something … it doesn’t work.” Would millions of women feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, celebrating the Eucharist, lobbying for justice, tending the sick, teaching children, writing theology, preac…
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…Foreign Terrorist Organization, or FTO, but a “domestic violent extremist” does not. In other words, a “homegrown violent extremist” is Muslim and a “domestic violent extremist” is White. In praxis, this institutionalized Islamophobia results in dire consequences. Muslim Americans are disproportionately prosecuted and sentenced under a different set of rules, including the USA PATRIOT Act charge of “material support of terrorism,” carrying a 15-ye…
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…mning three-part exposé of the family’s mansions, luxury cars, and private airplane. But perhaps the most damaging revelation was the claim by Crouch’s former chauffeur, Lonnie Ford, that Crouch had paid him $425,000 in hush money to keep silent, Ford claimed, about how he was forced to have sex with Crouch to keep his job. On the air, Crouch called the story a “pack of lies right out of the pit of hell.” Other prosperity televangelists closed ran…
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