When I moved to New York City just over a year ago, I started going to church. More precisely, I started going to the churches—dozens of them—that were located in New York City’s public schools. I attended services all over Manhattan, in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
The Times managed to find a Gandhi scholar who would argue that the greatest hero of radical resistance would endorse the critics of Occupy Wall Street.
The biggest misconception about the crusades is the belief that everyone understood them as religious wars between Christianity and Islam. Latin Christians understood it in that fashion, but for Greek Christians, the crusaders were essentially mercenaries employed against a rival empire. Both the Sunni Turks and the Shi‘i Egyptians probably understood the crusades in similar terms. It would take the Muslims several decades to learn to think of the battles against the Franks as religious wars rather than as conflicts over the control of frontier settlements.
To the chagrin of Britain’s Secular Society, which has protested, as the Guardian reports this week, that schools are “awash in Bibles,” every state school in England is going to get a new copy of the 1611 King James Version by the spring.
Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.