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

…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…

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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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Oppose Afghanistan But Not a Pacifist? Tough.

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

…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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The Incredible Shrinking Free Exercise Clause

…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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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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“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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Reports of the Death of ISIS Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

…raphic control of the Islamic State has liberated those areas of Syria and Iraq that it held. People who lived in Mosul are able to move freely, but they don’t have anywhere to go. The city is in shambles, and those trying to go elsewhere are herded into massive camps housing tens of thousands of refugees set up by the UN High Commission for Refugees in neighboring Kurdistan. I visited some of these camps in recent months and talked with a group o…

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