Category: Islam
Lower Manhattan, Our Gettysburg?
Some very foolish things have been said about the proposed Cordoba Muslim Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan, the majority of them, it seems to me by people who wouldn’t know how to find the site if they were dropped off at the closest subway stop.
Our Muslim Roots
I haven’t yet heard President Obama’s address to the Muslim world from start to finish. Instead, I caught sound bites and longer passages on the radio of a car I was driving yesterday across mountainous terrain. What I pieced together from three different public radio stations was refreshingly candid and at the same time sensitive to all.
As with his earlier address on race in America while still a candidate for election, the president treads where no other U.S. politician has dared to go. Unlike other presidents, Obama can speak of Islam from the familiarity of having lived in the world’s largest Muslim nation (Indonesia) and his paternal connections to the religion in Kenya.
Snake Handling and Other Religious Challenges
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| Categories: Barack Obama, Religion, Islam, Rick Warren, Reinhold Niebuhr, gay marriage, Rita Nakeshima Brock I hadn’t meant to write anything about Rick Warren. Really, what’s to say other than it’s depressing to have a homophobe on the national stage at the inauguration of a candidate who has brought hope to so many? Hope to the homophobic was not what all those gay and lesbian Obama volunteers had in mind, I’m sure.
Barack Obama may be a master politician, but he’s shown himself a bit greener when it comes to religion, that dangerous third rail of modern political life. Oddly, his secular humanist mother who married two Muslims taught him a lot about what I think of as Christian values. He turns the other cheek. He refuses to lie about his enemies. He cares for the poor. He embraces strangers.
But here’s the point I think he doesn’t get: in religion, unlike politics, you can’t just slice it down the middle and find consensus.
Savage Fear
| Categories: Religion, Spiritual Progressives, religion, Talk Radio, Michael Savage, liberals, Islam Talk radio show host Michael Savage claims to have ten million listeners. From his home in the affluent San Francisco suburb of Larkspur, he sends out a constant stream of anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and, oddly, autism-scorning diatribes that are more popular than they ought to be. One of his listeners apparently was Jim Adkisson, the man charged with shooting eight people in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville on July 27. Two of them died.
In the hours after Adkisson was thrown to the floor and arrested and roughly 200 congregants had been evacuated, police said they found copies of Savage’s Liberalism is a Mental Disorder , Let Freedom Ring by conservative talker Sean Hannity, and The O’Reilly Factor by Fox Television’s Bill O’Reilly in the shooter’s home.
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