Religion Dispatches
…ting at least in part in the way of the norm outside of the mosque. Unlike Europe, in America, Muslims do not live in ethnic ghettos. While there are class distinctions, Muslims live every where from the most wealthy neighborhoods to the poorest, not by religion but by class. It is less common, for example, for immigrant women to come to the US and know little or no English after two and three decades, for example. It happens but because the other…
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…roper are 500,000 so-called “guest workers” from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Outside of “Israel proper” lie the territories (variously modified with the adjectives “liberated,” “occupied,” or “administered”). In these territories (the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip), Israel has varying degrees of control over the Palestinian population (approximately 3.5 million people) and over the Jewish settler population (between 250,000 an…
Read More…f Ramadan. Has Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Islam affected his legacy? Priests in Europe know how to reach the kids. There’s the Italian DJ priest spinning the latest from Lady Gaga. Then there’s the skateboarding priest in Hungary. Awesome. Even more awesome: pilgrimages on a motorcycle. 10,000 motorcyclists took part in the festival of the Madonna of the Bikers in Porcaro, France. Christian Scientists want spiritual care covered in the federal health p…
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…r vacation is coming to an end. It s a slightly different story in much of Europe, where August—the entire month—is still devoted to vacation. August 15, the very middle of this most languid of summer months (the one that takes its name from a legendary Roman emperor) has significant additional religious resonance. In Greek it is known as the Panagia, the All-Holy Mary’s day, a religious holiday second in significance only to Easter. In Italian it…
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…ed States, “Toward the end of the 19th century… great waves of people left Europe and moved especially from Italy to America. As usual the Catholic Church devoted special effort and care to the spiritual welfare of these emigrants.” Church prelates have occasionally taken the Church’s stance perhaps too far. Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles once speculated that those who wished to refuse entry to the United States would be refused entry to he…
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…elations of widespread sexual abuse by priests and cover-ups by bishops in Europe, as well as the abuse of deaf children in the United States, are signs of the implosion of Roman Catholicism. The price has been incalculable in human terms. A flatter, rounder, more inclusive community is the only possible way forward. Allegations that Pope Benedict XVI acted with the same impunity as other bishops in the failure to brings perpetrators of abuse to j…
Read More…o extreme schedule differences for winter versus summer; like in the US or Europe right now. Sunrise to sunset was about 12 hours and therefore fasting was about 14 all year round. So I learned that it wasn’t an “Islamic thing” to party all night in Ramadan; or to be useless all during the day. It was a cultural thing — and fortunately I do not have to imbibe every other culture in order to be Muslim. So I stick to my schedule, up for suhur, pray,…
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…dates back to the European discovery of the Americas. We often forget that Europeans crossed the Atlantic in search of trade routes that would bypass Muslim empires and merchants. People of Muslim heritage were involved in the encounters and rivalries that established the Atlantic world, and some of them ended up in the Americas. It was not, however, until the rise of the Atlantic slave trade that tens of thousands of Muslims were brought to Ameri…
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…rilliance) made his books runaway bestsellers across Italy and the rest of Europe. Nobody in power likes people more popular than they are. What if that’s what it’s still about now? Power struggles. There’s a famous story about Carl Sagan: one of the most prominent astronomers (following in Galileo’s scientific footsteps) and one of the two or three most prominent science popularizers of the 20th century. In 1994, when Sagan came up for membership…
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…look at international context as well. The spate of anti-Muslim debates in Europe, including the French ban of the burqa, demand Iran respond in a manner that indicates Islamic solidarity. The language of the haircut restrictions centers around “Islamic” and “Western.” It is not coincidental that these events are happening in close temporal proximity to one another. The New York Times emphasizes the “clash of civilizations” myth in this ruling, wi…
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