Religion Dispatches
…. The bread for the host can be so low in gluten as to qualify for “gluten-free” labeling, apparently. The wine can be a barely fermented drink called “mustum” (a word I have never encountered outside of Catholic liturgical documents). Anyone who cannot receive the bread or the wine can commune fully in one or the other. And in a rather touching detail, a priest who is too infirm to stand at the altar, as canon law requires, can get a dispensation…
Read More…a dormitory and besides going to class and a small part time job, I was a free bird. In Ramadan a free bird, flies high on the rituals of the month. I stood for 20 units or tarawih every night that I was fasting. Like the first time reading through the Qu’ran in Arabic on my own this was exhilarating. Somewhere around 12 or 14 units, I lost track of everything outside of the recitation and the ritual performance—the zone. It was even more intense…
Read More…rch. I can assure him on good authority that the process of forming new models of church is well underway with Catholic women serving the needs of the world. I can also brief him on the fact that some of the nuns with whom he was speaking lead orders that include members who have lost so much respect for the institutional church that they barely acknowledge their relationship to it. The great irony of the diaconate discussion is that it’s not abou…
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…ust is understandably directed against the democratic government they themselves elected. And yet, if a handful of friends and I were able to bang our heads against the wall for years by speaking the truth about Communist totalitarianism while surrounded by an ocean of apathy, there is no reason why I shouldn’t go on banging my head against the wall by speaking ad nauseam, despite the condescending smiles, about responsibility and morality in the…
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…participants are encouraged to give their resources, time, and creativity freely to one another. Event organizers also consistently refuse all offers of corporate sponsorship, believing that it would be antithetical to their vision for the event to do so. On the flipside, this means that participants and others sometimes misconstrue the “gift economy” ethos as requiring Burning Man organizers to refrain entirely from engaging in the real-world m…
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…nd the “average citizen” were overshadowed by talk of China, Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, Israel, Iran, Germany, Ukraine, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Yemen, and those faceless “migrants” coming from countries where, according to Trump, violence is actually down (due, we’re left to assume, to their departure). You see, Harris touted that there were no “American military boots on the ground around the world,” as though the US doesn’t have a whopping…
Read More…Abraham. It is not an exclusive or single inheritance. Why then does God tell Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away from the campsite? Because God wants the woman and the boy to have their own birthright, their own land that would be separate from Isaac’s. In other words, God invented the two-state solution in Genesis 21. The interesting thing is that His invention works. In both the Bible and the Islamic hadith, the two peoples flourish side by…
Read More…overning). Let’s hope he’s better able to do it in his second term because the divide has never been clearer: it’s between those who know and celebrate Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall and those who do not….
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…hristians have merely been paying lip service to democratic principles and free elections, or whether they really believe in those principles and norms now that white Christians have become a demographic minority. This is all quite new—this reality of not being a majority white Christian country. We’ve gone from 54% white Christian to just 44% since Obama was first elected, or a drop of about 1% per year. Previous generations of white Christians h…
Read More…ific research, or the rights of children to have a public education that’s free of religious influence. Really, Heffernan is no creationist in the political sense of the word. Vocal creationists, at least, understand that their ideas have weight. They grasp that conversations about evolution can also be conversations about pluralism, and materialism, and the role of human beings in nature and society. And they link their creationism to worldviews…
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