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India’s Elections and the “Doniger Affair”

By Murali Balaji

…been intellectual or activist Marxists. Penguin’s decision to withdraw her book gave them new ammo in a battle against what they perceive as Hindu majoritarian aggression, exemplified by the destruction of the Babri mosque and the 2002 Gujarat riots. Many of these intellectuals aren’t religion scholars, and it’s perhaps a fair bet to say they’re not aficionados of Doniger’s book or her past research. For some, any opportunity to criticize Hindu ma…

Bobby Jindal Hypes His Christian Cred at Liberty U.

By Murali Balaji

…ned with detention if I didn’t sing gospel songs in my public school music class; and a teacher once asked whether the “chilled monkey brains” scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom accurately reflected Hindu practice. My family didn’t have many friends in the community, so I was an outsider, and often embarrassed to identify as a Hindu. I just wanted to be accepted as an American, because in this country, the dominant narrative has been—…

Is a Secular System Right for Egypt?

By Austin Dacey

…central religious authority in Islam—no church, no priesthood, no clerical class to govern the religious (and certainly not political) lives of Muslims. . . . The problem is that Islamic doctrine, jurisprudence, and historical practice do, in fact, both assume and fundamentally rely on the existence of a single Muslim polity with authority over Muslims’ religious affairs and the religious scholar class. Ezzat diagnoses this circumstance as a vesti…

The Mormon Version of Infallibility

By Holly Welker

…d that you’ll get results much like his: All but one man in the priesthood class said, “Oh, yeah. That’s true. That’s what we believe.” When, at the end of class, Stevens admitted that this was his paraphrase of the doctrine of infallibility as explained by a Catholic encyclopedia , they said something like, “Oh, well, we don’t believe that. That’s popish nonsense.” What Mormons have instead of infallibility is “instrayability,” a coinage by Steve…

“The Lord’s Standard of Morality” Promotes LDS Rape Culture

By Holly Welker

…vertent sight of a naked female thigh. Male missionaries, however, had gym classes scheduled throughout the day. They could and often did walk to and from their classes clad only in the skimpiest of shorts, their T-shirts in their hands or tossed over one shoulder. No one worried about the effect on young women of running into a gang of half-naked men—perhaps because we weren’t considered capable of any action that might endanger either them or us…

U.S. Bishops’ 15–year Battle For ‘Conscience’ and Against Contraception

By Patricia Miller

…or family planning clinics in low-income neighborhoods that served working-class Catholics, even as they knew that better-off women could access contraceptives through private physicians. But the approval of the Pill in 1960 and growing bipartisan support in Congress for a national, federally funded family planning program eventually swamped their opposition and they gave up the fight. I’ve been told by more than one source that by the mid-1970s,…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…isplay vision, argument or even evidence. This isn’t just one of the worst books ever written about Islam. It’s one of the worst books, period. Heretic is essentially a shoddy plea for a Reformation to save Islam from extremism, except that, according to Hirsi Ali, Islam is extremism, which should mean there’s no hope—and, oh yeah, Islam already had a Reformation, which is one of the chief causes of the extremism her Reformation will ostensibly pu…

Pastor Implicated in Sex Abuse Scandal is Back

By Rob Shryock

…art Mohler is by gushing over his “stack of books”: I’ve seen his stack of books. If you have a stack of books, I’m saying there’s quite a difference, pretty obvious difference, between your stack and his stack of books. So if you are comforting yourself, ‘I have a stack,’ well you might have a stack, but if we consider the nature and content of your stack as opposed to his stack, well, your stack looks pretty sorry and pathetic. The nature and co…

Baring Their Testimonies: Mormon Women Get Naked for the Camera

By Holly Welker

…t. I majored in communications/ broadcasting, not art, but I took some art classes. At BYU, models in figure drawing classes wear bathing suits. I also did a study abroad in Spain through the art program, with trips to Paris and London and so forth. I remember a conversation with a male art student in the program, a sculptor, who said that all nudity in art was pornographic. Of course I argued with him about it, and I think that most art students…

The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback

By Gary Dorrien

…-own-religion yields shallow and self-absorbed spiritualities. But the new books rightly emphasize that liberal Protestantism played a sizable role in creating the spiritual-but-not-religious sensibility that pervades the North American middle class, and they do so with a mostly appreciative attitude. From Shrinking Churches to ‘Cultural Victory’ Intellectual historian David Hollinger has spent the past decade writing about the overlooked social,…