Religion Dispatches
…t. Andrew’s Church. A rabbi, a priest, and an imam. A crowded sanctuary of city employees of Chinese, Nigerian, German, Italian, Irish descent. Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim. A gorgeous mosaic. We were all New Yorkers, and we were all Americans. We were mourning a great loss. We prayed for the dead. We prayed for the survivors. We prayed for peace. However, the narrative of 9/11 for many others is at odds with the average New Yorker. …
Read More…arade to show its love and support for LDS people. With the 2013 Salt Lake City Pride Parade scheduled for Sunday, June 2, RD spoke with Mormons Building Bridges organizer Erika Munson to get an update on the group’s activities. What’s happened with Mormons Building Bridges since your inaugural 2012 Pride Parade appearance? The march last year was an amazing catalytic spiritual experience for people there and watching from the route and from af…
Read More…vious book, said, “We are in a city with less children per capita than any city but San Francisco….and we consider it our personal mission to turn that around.” What that means for the women in his church, who are instructed to assume a “submissive” role within marriage, is predictable. “My life is much harder, not easier,” says a woman named Judy. “We had originally planned not to have kids, but now we have to do our best to repopulate the city w…
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…little cafes. Kuwaiti tourists had mounted a half-hearted invasion of the city, arriving as they do every summer to escape the Gulf’s scorching temperatures. The Sarajevo Film Festival was in full swing, and we’d just missed Angelina Jolie at our hotel. I imagine some of this is Sarajevans making up for lost time, seizing on life because they know how quickly it can be snatched away. But some of Sarajevo’s allure lies elsewhere. Once, Europe had…
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…accessible among privileged communities across the world. And for a large number of yoga advocates, the claim to possess knowledge of yoga is closely related to the quest for power, status, or money. There is much more to today’s yoga industry, however, than self-cultivation or profit. And Devi’s conscious effort to disengage from history does not represent the approach of all contemporary postural yoga practitioners. Many modern asana practition…
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…h century in Palestine, explicitly spoke of poor people who travelled from city to city. The cities, according to Mishnah, are obligated to supply them with food and lodging whether or not they were residents. By the Middle Ages, as historian Mark Cohen has shown in his book Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt, there were a large number of hostels for the poor (sponsored by Christians, Jews, and Muslims) stretching across…
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…lmost no potable water, are the interlocking towns of Hildale and Colorado City. The polygamists there who rejected Warren Jeffs in the 1980s reorganized under the name Centennial Park. The Centennial Park Action Committee, or CPAC, is made up of dynamic, vibrant women dedicated to decriminalizing polygamy: think Big Love. They wear modest but modern clothing; they are often educated and work as teachers, accountants, and office managers. They tak…
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…need for more investigative journalism covering evangelical schools. Grove City College: “Unraveling the Layers” According to class of 2011 GCC alum Eve (formerly known as Hännah) Ettinger, my recent coverage of GCC paints an overly rosy picture. “The more you unravel layers the more you see that going to GCC or working there is signing up to be complicit in the school’s discrimination against victims of sexual violence and against queer people.”…
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…ends of Sodom that depict it as an extraordinarily rich, stingy, and cruel city. See, e.g., Genesis Rabbah 42, 49; Leviticus Rabbah 5, Numbers Rabbah 9. Indeed, as Greenberg notes, only a single classical Jewish text, the Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, links Sodom with homosexuality, and then only in one of the two extant editions of it. All the rest discuss Sodom, at length, but never make the association. From Bad Neighbor to Sexual Sin, an Evolution Whe…
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…ll be safe from her otherwise imminent execution. As Hugo explains, “Every city during the Middle Ages, and every city in France down to the time of Louis XII. had its places of asylum. These sanctuaries, in the midst of the deluge of penal and barbarous jurisdictions which inundated the city, were a species of islands which rose above the level of human justice. Every criminal who landed there was safe. … Such respect was cherished for places of…
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