Religion Dispatches
…few of these assumptions hold. Of course, the emancipation of the Muslim woman cannot be stopped by anything as irrelevant as the Muslim woman’s opinions; to be liberated from objectification, she’s objectified. Consider the tension Agrama points out. If the veil is a choice (as most French Muslim women say it is) and not a religious obligation, then the French government can restrict it: French Muslims shouldn’t object to not being allowed to…
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…ted to his personal charisma, marketing skills, or both—was extraordinary. Today the International Sathya Sai Organization disseminates Sai Baba’s teachings and manages a network of over 1,200 Sathya Sai Baba centers in 126 countries. Most of his devotees came to acknowledge him as god-man without ever meeting him in person. Sai Baba’s devotees include powerful politicians (including former prime ministers of India), celebrities, and entrepreneur…
Read More…y, and the injustice all around him. Like many of the gays and lesbians of today, that coming out cost him his life. Coming out is not for wimps—it really does take a lot of guts. Jesus did not carry the banner for any church, for any religion, or for any government. Instead, he came out, loudly and proudly, and stirred controversy by standing both Hebrew and Roman law on their heads. He forcefully came out for the outcast, the underdog, the forgo…
Read More…explored in a piece for the Daily Beast in June), particularly his role in promoting homeschooling, Lizza gives short shrift to Rushdoony, who is not only a “prominent Dominionist,” as Lizza describes him, but the founder of Christian Reconstructionism and Titus’ inspiration. And, as Julie Ingersoll has detailed on numerous occasions, “Christian Reconstructionist founder Rousas John Rushudoony is often called the father of the Christian homeschool…
Read More…arah Lipton-Lubet, Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Today’s hearing was a political show-trial bought and paid for by the powerful lobbyists at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops exerting their influence over certain members of Congress. . . . [F]ederal tax dollars should not be used to impose religious values on others.” Issa, who claimed to be conducting the hearing over the $2 million contract because of the necessit…
Read More…made the coming of children into this world the result only of a man and woman coming together (as Christians we can presume God had in mind for children to have a mother and father). There is nothing obscene about recognising or celebrating that. What makes a “marriage” a “marriage,” then, is that one produces children and the other doesn’t. If a heterosexual couple then does not, will not, or cannot produce children, will they then be relegated…
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…ng the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community. Singularity is the sin that resonates with me—forcing people to choose one thing over another in terms of our identities. Hybridity, like an apple-pear blend, gets to the notion that we can…
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…at least partly inspired by fiction, the fact that it exists in real life today becomes even more remarkable. Kaitlin Foley has noted that social networking sites such as MySpace have played a significant role in galvanizing both virtual and bricks-and-mortar support for the Taqwacore bands, as they do for most bands today. How do you all think the fictional and virtual origins of Taqwacore have affected the development of the Taqwacore scene so…
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…gies, philosophies, languages, medical therapies, diets, rites of passage, codes of conduct, aesthetic norms, artistic conventions, and technologies furnish entire communities with a shared sense of identity and the ritual/theological grammars required to guide their common life and transmission of humanity from one generation to the next. If God’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou b…
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…ases.) Most folks found either of these approaches less than satisfactory. Today some historians see the Lisbon earthquake as signaling the end of the optimism of the European Enlightenment and the beginning of the anxiety and emotional excessiveness of Romanticism. “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others?” Perhaps the best known response falls more into the category of challenging our very notions of God and God’s world a…
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