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Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

By Brian McGrath Davis

…commands a bewildering following. Armstrong suggests that we would all be better off if we would return to Pseudo-D’s model, which, at its core, promotes both humility and unknowing. Throughout The Case for God, Armstrong highlights this one strand of the monotheistic traditions, the apophatic: the tradition of unknowing and negation. In doing so, she shows her reader a thread of history that refused to allow doctrine and dogma to take center sta…

Of Gods and Men Resurrects Martyrdom

By Nathan Schneider

…ngs, bear witness to the land. In an area increasingly beset by suburban sprawl, they live on a working farm. As the global ecological crisis worsens and inaction still reigns, they’re learning how to implement an ambitious environmental sustainability plan. It will make them better caretakers of the land that they’ve committed themselves to live—and die—on. Maybe it’s best to save the word “martyr” for other, more violent witnessing happening now…

RDBook: Huckabee ♥’s Nobody

By Kyle Mantyla

…that “that’s the best answer I’ve ever heard and exactly what I believe.” Betrayed by the Religious Right To anybody who paid any attention to Huckabee during the GOP primary, his disdain for the media was obvious, as was his loathing of Romney, so much of the book’s animus comes across as old news and surprisingly petty. What is astonishing is the outright contempt with which Huckabee treats the religious right establishment and its leadership….

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

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…lobal network was nourished in part to gain recruits to come to the Middle East battlefields where they provided a stockpile of suicide bombers willing to destroy themselves in savage attacks against ISIS’ imagined enemies. Some 30,000 young fighters came from all over the world to Syria and Iraq during the movement’s heyday in 2015 and 2016. But a much larger group were also involved, though primarily on line, in the animated chats of the online…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…atholics” and other backsliding Burners, confession is a popular practice, promoted this year at the Shame Project, a piece by Alissa Mortenson, which proclaimed “I am not a sinner. I don’t need to be saved and neither do you.” A City of Porous Boundaries It is easy to dismiss the privileged spiritual yearnings of successful middle-class Westerners who come out to the desert to blow stuff up as inconsequential, and yet Burning Man offers a glimpse…

Does American Zen Need Reform?

By Lisa Webster

…s out, whether it is temporal or spiritual. But many Americans looking for eastern enlightenment have hit up against a cultural confusion that makes discernment almost impossible. Over at Sweeping Zen, Erik Storlie has written a strong critique of the unexamined aspects of the east-west teacher-student relationship, while lamenting this “old and discouraging story.” In forty-six years of Zen practice I’ve observed Asian (and now Western) swamis,…

It’s Up to You, New York… To Oppose Islamophobia

By Randall Balmer

…and they successfully frustrated its implementation in favor of religious freedom and diversity. Throughout its history New York has accommodated – and even, more often than not, welcomed – religious diversity. Yes, sometimes such accommodation came only after a struggle, as with the Great School Wars of the 1840s, when Roman Catholics objected to the Protestant bias in public education. But we New Yorkers eventually rise to our better selves. It…

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…ness and accuracy. Purely in terms of securing SBOE approval, the path of least resistance would be for publishers to give the SBOE what it seems to want—that is, to sacrifice religious balance. The good news is that publishers generally didn’t take the path of least resistance. Indeed, the coverage of major world religions in the textbooks I reviewed was generally much more balanced and accurate than the Texas standards. (Readers interested in gr…

Al-Qaeda calls Obama “house Negro,” Muslims Answer

By Fatemeh Fakhraie

…n Obama to be our president.” Since many of Obama’s policies in the Middle East revolve around moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and taking a harder stance on Pakistan (both countries with strong al-Qaeda presences), al-Zawahiri is obviously reacting out of panic. Obama’s promises to end the war in Iraq, close Guantanamo Bay, and use more diplomacy in the Muslim world all translate to more international cooperation from the US and less suppor…

“Not a Christian Book”: The Perils of the Amazon Book Review

By Charlotte Gordon

…ionship with these two women is a foundational myth not only in the Middle East, but also in the west. Whether or not we are believers, we are still awash in its wake as it helps explain many of the battles between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. I set the first scene in Nasireya, the Iraqi city that was the location of early battles in the recent war, but which is also known as Ur, the traditional birth place of Abraham and Sarah, the founding…