new york

For several months there have been claims of an occult revival in New York City. Much like America’s evangelical tradition, its metaphysical tradition is in a constant state of revival. The 1960s and…

A new report details the egregious civil rights violations and damage to communities from the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities post-9/11.

We cannot trust the police, we cannot trust people on the subway, and Mayor Bloomberg fiddles.

I’m not arguing that Islamophobia is racist, or that Islamophobes are racists, because that’s not quite what’s happening. For one thing, Islamophobes embrace ex-Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and racists wouldn’t (indeed couldn’t) do the same. But consider the similarities: the Islamophobe must assume Muslims suffer some sort of pre-Islamic inferiority, sufficient to explain how some (largely non-white) people—actually, a lot of people—not only fell for Islam in the first place, but then stayed down. How long do enforced ideologies last? Nazism: twelve years. Communism: some decades. Islam: Fourteen centuries and counting.

Looking at the online flood zone map of our neighborhood I feel calm.

If there is one thing people need during a national disaster, it is functioning and effective government. If there is one time we need redistributive justice, it is during a crisis. Much of politics perhaps just comes down to what is, and is not, a crisis—a hurricane I hope we can all agree on. But what about climate change? Or health care? What is life-threatening? What is an emergency?

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

Now that we know, what will the mayor do?

Is the NYPD Hizzoner’s private army?

If you are the Catholic parent of LGBT daughter or son, you know firsthand that it is your child’s sexual identity, and not a belief in the Immaculate Conception, that puts them at risk for beatings and taunting. We find it reprehensible when a legacy of discrimination is invoked by those who themselves advocate repression. Archbishop Dolan and his colleagues should stop pretending that they face anything like the intolerance that our children do.