Religion Dispatches
…lid of Zanzibar and the Master Drummers of Burundi. Although both are from East Africa, they demonstrated very different musical sensibilities. The large Zanzibari group was rhythmic and melodic, using lyrics to praise God and Prophet Muhammad. The Drummers were obviously percussion-heavy, and were ecstatic in their performance. This geographic nearness with a strong performative divergence helped to illustrate that geography is not sufficient to…
Read More…National Geographic has a cool article on Darwin’s DNA, which traces his genetic ancestry to his paternal ancestors from their migration out of northeast Africa to the Middle East or North Africa around 45,000 years ago….
Read More…homosexual Mormon along with a pro-abortion/homosexual, Muslim Brotherhood promoter, Hard Left Fascist are running for president. And there is no cry of repentance from God’s people! I see this storm as a warning from the LORD to call His church to repentance, This might be the last call from the Holy God of Israel. Of course, all this insane talk completely disregards the actual science behind how hurricanes form. Hurricanes have no political age…
Read More…ay 2014 was the worst year in a decade for Egypt’s gay community, with at least 150 men arrested or put on trial. BuzzFeed’s report on the acquittal includes more detail about problems with the prosecution’s case, as well as allegations that at least one man was allowed by police to be raped by other prisoners while in custody. Kyrgyzstan: Europe Condemns Anti-Gay Bill; MP Wants to ‘Cleanse Society’ This week the European Parliament debated the dr…
Read More…ative consequences for the peace process: The full video is here. …
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…has posed itself as Christian love, but is as far away from Christ as the East is from the West. We’re trying to figure out where the compassion is for women’s lives and the lived experiences that we have—regardless of race, class, or gender, social economic status, or even sexual orientation. None of those things seem to matter to this administration. The only thing that seems to matter to them is undoing some of the very important work that was…
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…l, the intimacy of pastoral care, and the terrible conflict that developed between Edwards and most of the people in Northampton seemed parallel to some of the gifts and fights in the lesbian feminist community there as I’d know it in the 1980s and 90s. It was fascinating to me that such different ideologies seemed to share such similar emotional and social arcs. I thought for a time of writing parallel stories set in the same geographic space i…
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…a in the south, a story about drone strike in Marib, just two hours to the east, is also emerging. But lunch is a very important time in Yemen. Three other reporters join us and we order rice, salta—a traditional Yemeni lamb dish—chicken, soup and piles of fresh bread. Because of Pesach, I don’t touch the bread. I’m eating my salta with a spoon instead of scooping it with a handful of bread and Khalid raises his eyebrows. In Yemen, a meal without…
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…te is about the definition of citizenship. Immigration exposes the tension between an idea of citizenship as identity and citizenship as a category of legal belonging. In the former case, being a citizen means that one shares culture, language, history with the sovereign group. In the latter, citizenship means the ability and obligation to be part of the demos, the body of people who decide on law, are obligated by the law, and benefit from the la…
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…ped from such aggressive documentary techniques is, if not a misnomer, at least misleading: this is “realness television”—not reality, but something closer to that religious terminology invoked by the MTV crew. This is television confessional. The subject, once put within the constraints of the filmmaker’s structure—put on a locomotive like the one used to transport Jews to the death camps, as in Lanzmann’s case, or locked in a luxury house with v…
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