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The Garden of Eden: A Dull Place? Paradise Lust Author Explains…

By Nathan Schneider

…were lots of mentions of the Garden of Eden during the early years of the Iraq War. It would come up as a mournful, ironic sidenote in otherwise brutally depressing reporting. “This place, which is according to legend, the Garden of Eden, now looks like hell,” and the like. Which I always felt to be kind of unfair. Yes, the Garden of Eden story in the Bible is thought by most legitimate scholars to originate in much earlier Mesopotamian legend, w…

Tweeting ISIS Attacks: A Lesson in Not Learning a Lesson

By Haroon Moghul

…om the task at hand. The war in Afghanistan was about al-Qaeda. The war in Iraq was not. The former effort suffered because the latter proceeded. The French rejected the Iraq war, and have been attacked by an ISIL that emerged in great part due to that war. But, of course, the Iraqis had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and were invaded too. Some ten years ago, Western forces ranged the length and breadth of a Middle Eastern country, and today forces…

UNESCO on Religion, Culture and SOGI in Asia; Orthodox Family Sues to Stop Cremation of Israeli Trans Woman; Struggles of Iraqi Queer Activists; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…GQ young people. This is an area, generally, that merits further research. Iraq: Profile of Iraqi queer activist and organization In Huffington Post UK, Lucy Sherriff profiles Amir Ashour, “a 25-year-old Iraqi and the founder of the country’s only organization for its queer community.” Amir left behind his home and family a year ago and is currently living in Sweden. There, he hopes to register and expand his charity IraQueer, as it is illegal to…

Oppose Afghanistan But Not a Pacifist? Tough.

By Gabriella Lettini

…to die in combat since 1943, and he was killed within weeks of arriving in Iraq while searching for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. With an all-volunteer military asked to prosecute two wars, stop loss has become a backdoor draft. Yet some soldiers called to redeploy have come to believe that Iraq or Afghanistan is immoral or illegal. Joshua Casteel, an evangelical Republican, studied Arabic in college and enlisted after 9/11. In the docu…

Saipov Wasn’t a “Member” of ISIS, But That Misses the Point

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…he largest city controlled by ISIS, Mosul, was retaken by a combination of Iraq and Kurdish forces along with U.S. military air power. More recently the capital of ISIS, Raqqa, has been liberated by Syrian and Kurdish forces. There remain pockets of resistance in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor and smaller towns along the Iraq-Syrian border, but in general it is fair to say that ISIS’ days of territorial control are numbered. But ISIS has never bee…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…ignitaries, whom he reportedly told, while speaking about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, “I’m driven with a mission from God.” From the commander-in-chief on down, militarized Christianity may be nearly as much a part of the US military’s control structure as the chain of command. General David Petraeus, who led the “surge” campaign in Iraq, caused controversy by recommending that an evangelical handbook “should be in every rucksack for th…

The Intellectual Source Code For National Conservatism Can Be Found at This Niche Catholic Publication

By Peter Schwartz

…cultural conservatism in the United States. The foundation of this source code (the motherlode of the code, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most impo…

“What Kind of Islam Is That?”: Talking With Refugees From ISIS

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…n an acronym for the Arabic name for the movement, al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham (“the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [wider Syria]”–ISIL or ISIS). By coincidence, the term daesh also means something like the Arabic word for “bullies,” and for that reason ISIS leaders are annoyed by its usage. Probably also for that reason the term persists among those victimized by it. “The Daesh leaders are foreigners,” a Kurdish man from a village…

Reports of the Death of ISIS Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…and rise up when the time was ripe. The time could become ripe soon if the Iraqi government and international relief agencies do little to help repair and restore the city. Elsewhere in Iraq, in the Sunni-dominated cities of Fallujah and Ramadi that were liberated from ISIS control over a year ago, the movement has regained influence as the voice of Sunni protest against the Shi’a dominated Iraq government. It may be only a matter of months before…

Right Makes Might: The President as Political Realist

By John D. Carlson

…Obama wants to root himself within the ethical realist tradition embodied by other US presidents, he eventually will acknowledge the moral legacy of his predecessor’s decisions in Afghanistan and, yes, even Iraq. That US national interests were not as imperiled in Iraq as many contended proves the Iraq War something of an outlier. Time will tell, but we should not be surprised by the impact of Saddam Hussein’s ouster as a defining moment in Iraq’…