Religion Dispatches
…he hierarchy (saying the Pope is the “leader in purification, reform and renewal that the church so very much needs” or, “the Pope’s letter to Irish Catholics was courageous”) is the language of a dying institution. These are people who trade in words, who argue incessantly in ecumenical dialogues about a word’s meaning. The problem is, the Vatican and its minions haven’t figured out that we are past the days of the monastic scribe, slowly chiseli…
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…nsylvania and we’re taking it back.” Which brings us back to Israel/Palestine. Netanyahu and American Christian nationalists not only invoke similar religious rhetoric in their desire to expand their “Promised Land,” but they also start with a parallel us vs. them religiously-coded binary that envisions Native Americans and Arab Muslims in a similar category of the “savage” other. This rhetoric, in fact, serves a dual purpose for Netanyahu. On the…
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…community, all of them female, describe moments in which they were frightened or made to feel uncomfortable. One of them even employed a personal bodyguard. However, I never once had even a vague sense of danger during this research. There is a trope in American horror of the dedicated researcher who uncovers too much. The power of this trope played out in 1996, when a reporter in New York vanished while doing a story on the vampire community. As…
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…houris, dark-eyed women. We all know that Mohammad Atta, who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the Twin Towers on 9/11, was inspired by this promise. But among progressives, the sex promised to the righteous in the Qur’an isn’t sex as we know it, but something mysterious and sublime for which sex is a poetic stand-in. Second, what happens to our bodies in heaven? This is my favorite part of the heaven conversation. For if you believe in heaven…
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…e to advocate similar scenarios of armed struggle or to use similar hate speech? What if they controlled television networks and were leading presidential candidates? Would federal prosecutors and mainstream news networks tolerate the same behavior? Is it not remarkable that we take such things for granted from Robertson? As a wise media critic once said, “it’s a joke, but it’s not that funny.”…
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…tect. These responses, whether protective or challenging, are hardly new. One need only consider the Lisbon earthquake to see them play out with a strange familiarity regarding present circumstances. Such a return to the past is sadly telling in relation to the present. Lisbon: The End of Optimism? The Lisbon earthquake struck the capital of Portugal on November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day. Scientists today speculate that it probably registered as a…
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…Daily Show. It put you in a fascinating position. A lot of people in my generation turned to Jon Stewart for the news, and so they turned to you as a Muslim voice. They look at you as a spokesperson for Muslims. Do you then feel any responsibility to speak for Muslims? Does it limit you, or pressure you, in any way? It’s not a responsibility that I chose to take on. It’s something that happened in the culture because there are so few Muslim voice…
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…ould be more effective if it were honest. And perhaps that would have lessened the number of death threats and other vile correspondences she has received. Second, others have said that she deserved the criticism for its political harm, that this hurts the Democratic party. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make much sense either, because the manufactured outrage made it worse. If a Democratic leader had privately contacted her and said, “Ilhan, you have…
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…labama, ground zero for voter suppression, mysteriously broken voting machines in poor black neighborhoods, and every attempt to keep citizens likely to vote blue from exercising that right, old fashioned democracy prevailed. Doug Jones eked out a narrow victory, and Judge Roy Moore lost fair and square. But he didn’t concede. Moore’s short non-concession speech late Tuesday night was comprised almost entirely of a paraphase of Psalm 40. He attemp…
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…gerous consequences of rejecting peace that they will turn toward peace. But it seems more likely that real peace will begin only when enough Israelis decide that they no longer want to define themselves by their traditional self-image, that they want a new one to match the reality of their power. Then the majority of Israeli voters will be able to find national pride not in the exercise of power but in the pursuit of peace. When that day comes, w…
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