Religion Dispatches
…tion to Allah. I also like the way he refers to our Prophet Muhammad. I think, the problem we used to have with being referred to as Mohammedans was only to clarify that we do not worship the Prophet. Because, in a way, what links us to other Muslims today is not just tawhid as much as it is that we follow the way of Muhammad. We are the ummah of Muhammad. According to the Qur’an, he will be a witness for us. And this makes me think, who is this P…
Read More…tion to Allah. I also like the way he refers to our Prophet Muhammad. I think, the problem we used to have with being referred to as Mohammedans was only to clarify that we do not worship the Prophet. Because, in a way, what links us to other Muslims today is not just tawhid as much as it is that we follow the way of Muhammad. We are the ummah of Muhammad. According to the Qur’an, he will be a witness for us. And this makes me think, who is this P…
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…ionalist slogan embraced by neo-Nazis since 2017. “I talked to Trump twice today!” For the evening session, Marco Rubio had been announced to give a keynote—but, as many attendees had already noticed, Rubio changed his dinner plans and skipped NatCon to attend the evening’s Trump rally in Miami in the hope that he’ll be tapped to be VP. Instead, Vivek Ramaswamy waxed on about the values of “national libertarianism.” Ramaswamy, maybe to show that h…
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…ions, developing a theory of “family values” that often fails in practice. Today, we can point to anything from the Catholic Church’s continued refusal to ordain women, to one of the nation’s most popular pastors calling us a “pussified nation,” to fierce national debates over abortion and birth control whose implicit terms are the assertion of control over women’s bodies. Though our jurisprudence is today unlikely to cite men’s divine responsibil…
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…ink’s words every day (I know I’m not the only one), but they come to mind today for a couple of reasons in particular. There’s a more important contemporary voice to listen to: one saying, “Mní wičhóni” or “Water is life” or “Defend the Sacred.” That voice recognizes the dangers of coal in ways that Governor Link could never have expected. The prayer camp led by Native Americans at Standing Rock in southwestern North Dakota formed an intersection…
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…vocacy is considerably more complex than is suggested by such accounts. To promote religious rights is to promote a particular mode of governing social diversity that implicates religion in complex and variable ways, depending on the context. Legal and political advocacy for religious freedom tends to mask other contributors to social tension and conflict, amplify and entrench the religious divisions it seeks to manage, and force political authori…
Read More…o criticized the verdict. “We are disappointed by the Federal Court ruling today to uphold the Appeals Court decision of March 2014 sentencing Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition leader, to five years in prison on charges of sodomy, a crime that should not exist under international human rights law,” he said in a statement. China: Alibaba marketing campaign promotes same-sex couples China’s social media behemoth Alibaba launched a marketing campaign…
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…cular approach to human-animal relations one that we might seek to revisit today. But this doesn’t prevent us from reading Francis as a figure who challenged the shape of political life in his time—and might still, in our own. The world he cared about was bigger, broader, and more complex than that encompassed by human society. It’s not that we don’t need wisdom or counsel of figures like Francis, but the terrors and trials we face today are unpr…
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…d only truly became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and is known today as one of the most influential Catholic theologians with regards to evolution in the second half of the 20thcentury. To chart this influence, one need only note Teilhard’s citations by the three most recent Popes. In 2003, Pope Saint John Paul II echoed Teilhard’s vision of a cosmic Eucharist in the encyclical Ecclesia Eucharista: Because even when it is celebrated on…
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…wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance of the far right in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet ironically, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed” now rules the state of Israel. Hartman may not be able to change that reality, so he wants to change the story. Is it possible, today, for one to not be a Zionist and still be p…
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