Tag: tourism
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The Kabul Scarf
It’s New Year’s Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end the endless war, to which so many young people in that country have…
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Studying Religion Is Revolutionary in China
Like pretty much everything else over there right now, religion is a growth industry in China. After decades of official repression a whole bunch of new religious movements—and, even more, new forms of old religions—are gathering steam. Trying to get a handle on this from back here in New York, I did an interview with…
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Hipsters, Hasidim, and My Bike Lane
A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant…
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Religion Returns to Montreal
“Bonjour, hello,” I’m told, finally reaching the front of the long line at the convention center cafe. It’s Montreal. I can say “bonjour,” at least. Wouldn’t that be polite? But that could invite an incomprehensible flurry of Quebecois French, which would only serve to remind me how utterly I failed to learn the language from…
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Beautiful Dreamers
Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful. If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind,…
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The Quaker Birds of Costa Rica
It began with the advice of a federal judge in 1949. If you’re not going to follow United States law and register for the draft, he told the group of Alabaman Quaker farmers before him, “get out of this country and stay out.” So they did. In 1951, along with several dozen family members and…
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Radio Silence
“Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” —Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Going off into the wilderness for some unknown days—unknown in length, unknown in content, unknown in consequence—I’m taking the opportunity to wrest myself from the vicious habits of blogging, into the naked, unpublishable chaos of experience, quiet as long as need be…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
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Some Sound Economic Analysis
I know most of you have been keeping up on your Harun Yahya press releases, but for those who haven’t, you may have missed an astonishing occurrence, which I report on today on Vice magazine’s blog: You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs?…
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The End of Evangelical-Bashing?
So what if I didn’t finish my first book before graduating from college? Today at Religion Dispatches I have an essay about someone who did—Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple, an account of his semester “abroad” from Brown at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Like me, Roose was happy at Brown. We each ventured into…