Religion Dispatches
…tch ride outside the gates of the estate where I can have bars for my cell phone and get in touch with them later today. Before the shaykh arrives, I continue with my Qur’an reading. I don’t use the tiny mp3 player anymore because this last juz’ includes most of the Qur’an that I have memorized myself, and this is more a review than a simple reflective read. Coming to the end of the Qur’an reading is also melancholy, and I forget why I felt I shou…
Read More…ernet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story and pr…
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…A software engineer from Singapore, Tan joined Google in 2000 as employee number 107. He later founded the company’s in-house meditation program and became one of corporate mindfulness’ most visible advocates. Though Tan left Google six months ago, his final official job title at the company still doubles as his nickname: Jolly Good Fellow. Over the course of two phone conversations, RD asked Tan—who was, in fact, quite jolly—if mindfulness is a…
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…le: these monsters are a five billion dollar industry. They appear in cell phone ads for Sprint, they chase runners in 5Ks, and they scare crowds at haunted houses and theme parks. With The Walking Dead and World War Z, zombies cemented their reign as the favored monster of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The zombie’s ubiquity begs for explanation, and there is no shortage of theories. David Denby, writing about World War Z …
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…k millennials ages 18-29 comprise 20% of historically black churches. This number is roughly comparable to that of the baby boomer generation. Thus, religious affiliation for young black adults does not show the same kind of downward shift as that of the non-black population (the data on black children in the generation after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). African Americans in general, and African-American women in pa…
Read More…erence talk shaming homosexuality. “I have a brother who said to me on the phone last Christmas, ‘Elder Packer says God does not make gays. This is your choice.’ And then he used some very hurtful language with me,” Jahn relates. “I had to hang up on him. But he feels he has been given permission to speak this way by the prophet.” “Even a simple phrase uttered by a General Authority can give Church members broad permission to look down on, discrim…
Read More…ront Nationale, led by Marine Le Pen, picked up its first two seats in the French Senate. The Party has aligned itself with the aggressive anti-marriage equality movement in France. Taiwan: ‘Asian Nobel’ Winner Urges Marriage Equality Albie Sachs, a former South African Constitutional Court judge, has received a Tang Prize for the rule of law. Taiwan introduced the Tang Prize in five categories this year as an Asian version of the Nobel prizes. In…
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…n’t have true fidelity without some kind of radical equality. So there’s a number of different counterweights there: women need to be free to make choices for themselves, but they need to be faithful to their relationships. Meanwhile, their partner needs to be faithful to the relationship while allowing that person to have some power and some choice. Walter: That’s right. And of course when you say all that, that’s why the issue is so difficult. T…
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…was The Life of Mohammad published in 1730 by Henri de Boulainvilliers, a French count and early Enlightenment philosophe. The count’s biography is full of acclaim for Muhammad as both political revolutionary and religious visionary, describing him as “an incomparable statesman, a lawmaker superior to all those produced by ancient Greece.” Boulainvilliers’ admiration for Muslim doctrine gets only the barest and most perfunctory of Christian fig-l…
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…that. I was at a conference in Geneva last summer in June, and there was a French scholar who was talking about genetic ancestry testing in Europe, and how some people were trying to make white supremacy claims about different European groups. So who has more Celtic ancestry? Are the Greeks, are the Mediterraneans, are they really Mediterranean, are they Anglo-Saxon? Those kind of questions. These tests can certainly be used for national ethnic ch…
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