Religion Dispatches
…istribution. When I was young, Conference was translated into a handful of European languages and Tongan. A few years ago, I spent a whole morning tuning into the various real-time translation streams on-line. As someone who has spent some time in the Navajo Southwest, I listened longest to Conference in the beautiful Dine Bizaad—Navajo language. Ya’a’teeh, brothers and sisters. Happy conference weekend. And welcome to 21st century Mormonis…
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…the holiest site in Judaism]. On the other hand, although in much smaller numbers, there are Jews who regard the very presence of the mosques as an obstacle to the redemption of the people of Israel. A larger number hold a Kahanist worldview, according to which—irrespective of the conflict with the Palestinians—the Jewish state should cast out the Arab minority from within. Some of them are willing to try to implement this goal in a violent way o…
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…I think less is more. The less attention we give to the matter of niqab in European and North American public space, the more effective we are in removing it as a topic of interest — and then removing it as an item of dress choice. But on the other hand, it is in the news again and I was asked to say something. I know, I could easily just say no; I do not wish to discuss it. In fact, I took one of those informal polls on Facebook and Twitter, and…
Read More…Europe. Those efforts were buttressed, and their effects documented, by a number of polls over the last two years that showed American Muslims to be diverse, educated, assimilated, successful, and mainstream (both politically and religiously). For immigrant Muslims, America has represented freedom. Especially prized by them, according to the polls, has been America’s commitment to religious freedom. One such immigrant Muslim told the Times “In no…
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…She says that she could recognize “absurdity.” And that may have been the best qualification. Un-Faking the War The ‘fake’ war may just get real. President Obama recently signed “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act,” the main and most remarkable provision of which is: …to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the continued absence of a negotiated solution, and to disarm and…
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…e process of conquest, to the accrued corpses of populations laid waste by European-born epidemic disease through three centuries of colonial rule—Mexicans in some sense have been understood as “born to die” violent, brutal and untimely deaths. The ritual and public display of the mutilated bodies of victims of narcoviolence are thus like so many sacrificial victims cast down down the steps of the great Templo Mayor of the Aztec capital Tenochtita…
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…dates back to the European discovery of the Americas. We often forget that Europeans crossed the Atlantic in search of trade routes that would bypass Muslim empires and merchants. People of Muslim heritage were involved in the encounters and rivalries that established the Atlantic world, and some of them ended up in the Americas. It was not, however, until the rise of the Atlantic slave trade that tens of thousands of Muslims were brought to Ameri…
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…practices, rather than dismiss them as pagans who had nothing to teach the European Christians. He advocated in behalf of social justice for the Natives rather than their exploitation by the new conquerors. He wrote that when Indians saw the cruel ways of “English, Irish men,” they responded “We wear no clothes, have many gods, and yet our sins are less. You are barbarians, pagans wild, your land’s the wilderness.” How did he see what few in his d…
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…ust fine. If you can lump all those liberal, “fake” Christians in with the European-style socialists and America-hating progressives, it further solidifies the libertarian-Tea Party-Christian-worldview-ahistorical-revisionist wing of American politics. The Glenn Beck-GOP mutual admiration society nothwithstanding, some of his conservative Christian friends were worried that he may have portrayed them in an uncaring light. And that’s where Beck’s t…
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…years after the revolution. These two elements, the Green Movement and the European marginalization of their Muslim communities, demonstrate how weak and ineffectual the current Iranian regime is. The result is they are emulating the Saudis and using faith as a cudgel to demonstrate that they do still have some power. Interestingly, one of the things that may emerge from this, as The Christian Science Monitor intimates, is that men may now be subj…
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