Religion Dispatches
…est of the Muslim community, which has made these arguments for years. The international Amman Message, for example, was issued in 2007, and the Islamic Center at NYU is a center based on the message. The Islamic Society of North America issued a similar statement in 2005. The difference between these endeavors and the Ahmadi community’s statement is that that these other messages are far-reaching, including as they do wide sections of the Muslim…
Read More…f the analysis of Zeitgeist and Loughner has focused on its ideas about an international banking conspiracy that uses currency to foster debt slavery with the goal of instituting a one world government. But such analysis only accounts for part of what is going on in the film. As Jesse Walker points out, in the case of Zeitgeist the labels “left” and “right” are pretty useless descriptors. Rather than placing the film, and by proxy Loughner, on the…
Read More…to do, and forget the flesh and blood individuals whose lives have been transformed and who deeply mourn the passing of religious leaders such as Ruiz; he not only lived with the poor, he learned their language (four Mayan dialects), and placed their struggles on an international arena. And yet I hope that ten years from now his advocacy will not be remembered as a relic of the past—a Church that once was—and instead that there’ll be an active rem…
Read More…pear more broadly based. The Polish seminarians’ banner conveys a message. International delegations from France and Ireland had similarly Catholics flavors. But finding Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Pagan, and other participants was not easy. Evangelical Christians put on a rock concert in a nearby park after the march this year. It was advertised by “Rock for Life” with the logo of a fetus playing an electric guitar. They offered some diversity. T…
Read More…is “initiative” was David Bahati, the Ugandan parliamentarian who achieved international notoriety for introducing the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009,” a bill that sought to introduce the death penalty for certain same-sex consensual acts. Commenting on the Rolling Stone article, Mr. Bahati said that the campaign “would have been very helpful to law enforcement of these people; it would have been a great source for law enforcement.” David Kato w…
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…y and Banking. In that book, North explains his view that the cause of the international debt crisis of the 1980s was the Federal Reserve System. The solution, he maintained, rested in eliminating that institution and moving to a hard money standard. It sounds familiar to Paul-ites, but for North it is all based in the biblical command to have “just weights and measures.” Paul, in very similar language, attributed our current debt and economic cri…
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…tention and interrogation in countries where—in the CIA’s view—federal and international legal safeguards do not apply; in other words, to countries that torture. The U.S. has long been engaged in torture: from the genocide of native peoples, to the lynching of African Americans, to the School of the Americas, to the Tuskegee Institute, to the treatment of prisoners in US prisons. And, as this most recent case shows, US torture culture is not limi…
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Bill Gothard is intent on defending himself. He’s speaking with me by telephone from the Northwoods Conference Center in Watersmeet, Michigan, where he spends every January “for study and writing and reflecting and fasting.” The controversial 76-year-old evangelist wants to explain away the “distortions” of his critics, and why, he insists, that widely-discussed “Taliban Dan” ad had it all wrong. In the ad (run last fall by congressional candidat…
Read More…ent, $400 million from Marsh & McLennan and $725 million from the American International Group. Last week, he filed suit against GMAC Mortgage, accusing the loan servicer of filing fraudulent affidavits in hundreds of Ohio foreclosures. His office has returned money to investors, pension funds, schools and cities. And he has directed millions to agencies fighting foreclosure. “We see what Washington doesn’t: the houses lying vacant, the eyesore st…
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…e or less the same background and cultural assumptions to a vastly diverse international and cultural smorgasbord. Famous Harvard researcher Marc Hauser, who ironically studies the evolution of morality, has had to retract one published paper and is caught in the gnarly web of university and federal investigation he said/she said that I would wish upon no one. From the eventual investigation reports we will one day learn the final word on the alle…
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