Religion Dispatches
…approaches to the same problems. Allow me to explain. Many Muslims are African-American. A rising proportion are Mexican. Where do the boundaries between these groups lie? If “Muslim” is separate from African-American, does that mean Islam trumps (sic) blackness? What happens with Eastern European Muslims—who are, by any reasonable definition, white and (obviously) European? Are their “culture and politics” more like white, Christian, Italian-Amer…
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…he potluck. You have said that you chose to focus on the corporate world because that way you can move the world’s most powerful people toward change. Yes. At the same time, the fact I’m doing it actually reflects a limitation on my part. For example, I don’t know how to teach children. I’ve never taught prisoners; I’ve never taught the disadvantaged population. I don’t know how to do those things. What I can do is teach the engineers and leaders…
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…erything we assume about selfhood in 21st century America is this: No, you can’t. Because your body isn’t yours alone. It belongs to you but it also belongs to God and especially to the community. In the Catholic tradition there is an ongoing and active relationship between the living and the dead. The communion of saints is a community which includes both living and dead people. Since they are still important members of the community in order to…
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…ve your house. It is so perfect for you.” And I do. I love her house not because I grew up there (I did not) or because I’ve spent much time there (I’ve only visited once) or because of anything to do with the way it looks. I love her house because of what it stands for. It’s a symbol of her freedom. Freedom from every man who raised a hand to her, mistreated her, or manipulated her with money; freedom from days of “shopping” in our grandmother’s…
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…in the “real” physical environment of the player, as mediated through the phone’s camera. As one player told a reporter: “This is full on escapism, where I’m like ‘let me just go catch some Pokémon and ignore the news.’” What news is she talking about? The murders of Sterling and Castile and the Dallas police officers. She is referring to the news of death. But in a matter of days Pokemon Go has changed our relationship with death. This is new te…
Read More…’ offices pretty much go directly in the trash. They pay more attention to phone calls and letters, but street protests don’t bother them at all, unless they’re on cable news, which they almost never are. Hashtags? Changing your Twitter avatar? Forget about it. Popular protest does play a supporting role in getting us to a point where something like the Congressional sit-in works. So do the organizations—including the religious groups—who sponsor…
Read More…. Randy Berry, the U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI People categorically denied this claim last November during meetings with church officials at the Vatican to discuss the persecution of LGBT people globally. The new document, called “Amoris Laetitia,” or “The Joy of Love,” affirms church doctrine that abortion is never justified, that same-sex unions are not “similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and famil…
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…came a springboard for critical engagement as I began to develop a theological vocabulary to describe what happens in those spaces. I learned to love myself. I learned to be a healer in my community. Surely, gay nightclubs become religious spaces amidst the communitas of queer bodies inhabiting space together in kinship, but our people, Latin@s and Latin Americans, have a long history of creating ceremonial centers when our own homes became violen…
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…touch. Communal feeling, or feeling commune-ion, blackness is an alternate sanctum, an otherwise sanctuary, an ecology or constellation of joyous practices of re/assemblage-amid-disassemblage. Quantum communions, quantum solidarities. Orlando’s Pulse is this too. This is a moment for unequivocal black church and queer/ LGBT solidarity because antiblackness and homophobia and transphobia are interconnected. More still, in the face of Trump’s doubli…
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…ncluding Imran Sarker, have stayed in the country and continue to publicly call for political and social reform and organize rallies after each attack and murder. But this is not an option for everyone. Now, after last month’s attacks on LGBT activists, aid groups are dealing with an entirely new field of requests for emergency assistance. There are simply are not enough resources to rescue all those threatened in Bangladesh. And even so—who would…
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