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

…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…

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Tweeting ISIS Attacks: A Lesson in Not Learning a Lesson

…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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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

…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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Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

…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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Oppose Afghanistan But Not a Pacifist? Tough.

…Instead, he became the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq—he believed ordering soldiers to fight would make him a war criminal. He volunteered to go to Afghanistan or to resign from the military. Instead he was prosecuted in military court, where he was not allowed to use his moral and legal assessment of Iraq as a defense. National Guard troops were ordered into a war they never expected to fight. Sherburne Baker, son of Cel…

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

…and Rumiyah have constituted an alternative movement rivaling the size and significance of the Arab Sunni-based Caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The global network was nourished in part to gain recruits to come to the Middle East battlefields where they provided a stockpile of suicide bombers willing to destroy themselves in savage attacks against ISIS’ imagined enemies. Some 30,000 young fighters came from all over the world to Syria and Iraq during…

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

…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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Reports of the Death of ISIS Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

…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…

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

…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…

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Egypt Goes After Gays to Silence Islamist Critics; South Africa’s ‘Open Mosque’ is Closed; Global LGBT Recap

…ther setback in the struggle for gay rights on the continent. Chad’s penal code is more than half a century old and does not explicitly mention homosexuality. But section 361 of a draft new code states the punishment for anyone who has sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex is 15 to 20 years in jail and a fine of 50,000-500,000 Central African francs (£60-£600), according to a document seen by Agence France-Presse. The cabinet claims that…

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