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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…h ultra-Orthodox men interfering in your travel, you can just take another airline. If only it were as easy for female employees affected by the numerous lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement to find a better job. *Correction: This post originally indicated that gender separation was due to concerns about women’s menstrual cycles. To read more about gender separation among Haredi Jews in Israel and in the U….

What the Lost Finale is Really About

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trillion hit…

‘Barbaric’ v ‘Progressive’ Islam; Catholic Church Objects to Mexican Court OK For Gay Adoption; Malaysian Court Weighs Boundaries Of Civil and Shariah Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…fundamental basic human rights because of their sexuality.” Alagie Jammeh is a student at the University of California Santa Barbara….

Studying Religion is Suddenly Popular

By Mark Hulsether

…erished environs of Macalester College and the University of California at Santa Barbara.) Intentionally or not, one effect is to underplay the importance of economic class as a focus of attention. Can the religious concerns of white working-class Christians (or for that matter the concerns of non-white immigrants, who are predominantly Christian) be valorized as part of ASR’s bold new future? Within the logic of this argument, must such groups pr…

Is Norway’s Suspected Murderer Anders Breivik a Christian Terrorist?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…nds as a textbook Theorizing Revolution, a book written by my colleague at Santa Barbara, John Foran). It also includes theoretical and historical overviews of European history and political ideas, and an attempt to explain Muslim ideas and Islamic history; skewed in such a way to make it appear as if this major religious tradition were a single ideology eager to control the world. The manifesto also includes a how-to manual for the creation of te…

Feared Taliban Leader Killed, But Military Strategy is Not the Answer in Afghanistan

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…egy simply will not win. A new policy is in order. Recently we convened at Santa Barbara a workshop of senior scholars of South Asia studies in the United States, and asked them to evaluate the US role in South Asia. The scholars agreed upon the following five principles as the bases for formulating a new US policy: 1. Support self-determination. The Obama administration needs to make clear that the people of the region shall decide their own futu…

RDBook: Power Belongs to God

By Nathan Schneider

…il I spent a day at a “prophecy conference” in a packed church in affluent Santa Barbara, California. Don’t worry about human suffering in the Middle East, the pastors taught, worry about God’s will. People nodded and took notes, and in that room everything I thought I knew about the world felt worthless before the vision of mystical order. Talk like this can’t be used: speak it, even hear it, and it uses you. You become it. Something similar migh…

Alums Speak Out Against Anti-Gay Christian College

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

Thirty-one gay and lesbian alums of Westmont College in Santa Barbara recently wrote an open letter to the school newspaper describing the “doubt, loneliness, and fear” they felt while attending the school. One hundred fellow alums signed on. Instead of circling the wagons and strenuously defending the “homosexual practice” forbidden in its code of ethics, the school is reaching out. 51 of the school’s 92 faculty members responded, seeking “forgi…

Obama’s Oil-Soaked Prayers

By Johnny P. Flynn

…ion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but when the oil blowout happened in Santa Barbara in 1969, politicians in California and Washington reacted by passing the National Environmental Protection Act and the California Environmental Quality Act. I was around in those times, had occasion to use these laws and other environmental regulations to protect American Indian sacred lands. We might have prayed, but it was not the only thing we did to hold c…

No Buddhists in Washington?

By Danny Fisher

…Bhante Chao Chu of the Los Angeles Buddhist Union, B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, Roshi Joan Halifax of the Upaya Zen Center, Bhante Kondanna of the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara, Jan Willis of Wesleyan University, and two-time Colbert Report guest Lama Surya Das are just a few names that come immediately to mind. President Obama has said: The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a grea…