Religion Dispatches
…, where they were well entrenched, to the Sunni dominated areas of western Iraq, even conquering Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, which it plundered for its wealth and military armament. It’s fair to describe ISIS as a terrorist regime, since it uses extreme acts of violence to intimidate both its enemies and its own population. The savage beheadings of Western journalists and aid workers that were posted on the Internet were matched by dozens,…
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…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…
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…e that’s the next book… Nobody even raised the issue when the U.S. invaded Iraq! Or did they? Actually, there 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…
Read More…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…
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…articulated the idea that, like a series of concentric circles, the Church spins around the regular celebration of the Mass, which in turn spins around the sacrament of the Eucharist performed by an ordained priest. But it hadn’t always been so—Lateran IV was a reaction to other Late Antique and medieval controversies that had led to accusations of heresy and holy war. Indeed, the so-called “Latin Mass” that the Right continues to reference itself…
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…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…
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…ethical grounds, you object to “war in any form.” This requirement denies freedom of conscience to those serving in the military who follow religious or philosophical principles of just war. Put plainly, if you are a soldier and believe a war (such as Iraq or Afghanistan) is morally wrong, it is illegal for you to refuse to deploy—even if you believe participation implicates you in an immoral war or in war crimes. Instead, soldiers refusing to fi…
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…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…
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…elevant, which is why the Westboro Church case will be decided strictly on free speech grounds and not as a free exercise case. Smith was immediately unpopular and congressional efforts to overturn it by statute met with limited success, leaving federal government actions that substantially burden religious practice subject to the compelling state interest test, but state and local laws exempt. The funeral privacy interest in Snyder is a generall…
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…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…
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