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Enlightenment’s Islam: A “Necessary Fiction”

By Rob Goodman

…ty is well-known—but less so is the way that such criticism often went hand-in-hand with pointed praise of Islam. No longer the scourge of Christendom, Islam was transformed in the Enlightenment mind into the perfect foil for the Church: a creed “without mortification or whips,” free from abstruse theology and hierarchies of priests. Enmity for the Church also led Voltaire, in 1772, to praise Islam “because it does not descend into the folly of gi…

Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry

By Amy Laura Hall

…bove mistakenly discovered significance, unable to process that McMurtry’s American West, a “lonesome country,” is not a serviceable morality tale. I’m currently writing a book on muscular Christianity and know the publishing pressure to shoot fish in a barrel. “Send us a manuscript with guns on the cover.” That’s almost a direct quote from an acquisitions editor. Nothing has perked up ears more than my research on “Cowboy Church.” Put the Marlbor…

Failure to Grasp the Distinct Character and History of Eastern Christianity is Compromising Our Understanding of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

By Katherine Kelaidis

…mention the fact that, in the case of Orthodoxy, this often results in non-Western convert communities, such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Korea, being completely ignored). This conflation ignores the very real history of conquest and occupation that occurred between Western and Eastern Christendom, in which the West has almost always been the aggressor, that stands as one of the foundations of modern Eastern Christian identity. For example,…

The Anti-Gay Highway

By Kathryn Joyce

…conservatives who are going to Africa, and they started spreading this anti-gay rhetoric across sub-Saharan Africa. We started getting a lot of statements from US evangelicals that homosexuality is wrong and that there is this Western agenda among gays to take over world. So it is coming from the West. Why is it a proxy war? In America, these politics have been going on for a long time—since the ’80s they have been used as a political tool to gain…

Recognizing (the Long History of) Christian Witches May Be Key to Diversifying Witch Community

By Daniel Wise

…Recent profiles of witchcraft have often focused on young witches who self-identify as pagan and who self-consciously distance themselves from Christianity. But while magic in antiquity existed in a diverse religious milieu that included pagan, Christian, and Jewish influences, magic has existed in a primarily Christian context for the past thousand years in the West—until recently, of course. Given the different role Christianity plays in BIPOC…

West Virginia Mayor Enlists Churches To Pray Away Drugs and Crime

By Sarah Posner

…imagine the power that would be unleashed if every church on September 7 at 11:05 a.m. … would take a moment to pray.” Williams has more than a few supporters, despite the constitutional issues raised by his endorsement of an explicitly Christian prayer effort. Boyd County (Kentucky) Circuit Judge George Davis III said Williams is “following the model that our founding fathers laid centuries ago,” adding that “before our Constitution could be rati…

How New Religions Are Made

By Jacob S. Dorman

…ed his concept of culture from his work studying racial types in his little-mentioned 1920s physical anthropology. Knowing this helps explain some of syncretism’s weaknesses: its cultural holism, its depiction of cultural formation as the result of hostile, binary, systemic confrontations with little human agency, and its depiction of culture as metaphorically genetic. In contrast, the cultures created in the Americas are imaginative, endlessly po…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…mmigration in the late 1980s brought a large group of secular Jews (and non-Jews) who, being the victims of anti-Semitism, have little or no sympathy for the Arabs; whether citizens of Arab countries, Israeli citizens, or inhabitants of the West Bank. Finally, and most interestingly, the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox. This group, mostly descended from Eastern European Jews, were traditionally (and confusingly to outsiders) actually anti-Zionist and n…

Strange Bedfellows: The American Far-Right and Today’s Jihad Do Have Something in Common — Just Not What You Think

By Suzanne Schneider

…states in which the Islamic State operates. The appeal to mobilization vis-à-vis jihad, however few heed its call, cannot be understood outside this sense of disenchantment with the status quo and its champions. That the society the Islamic State proposes to build on the ruins of modernity’s -isms holds little promise for real human flourishing should not, amid this time of ascendent far-right movements worldwide, be regarded as an anomaly. A ‘do…

Tribal Trouble: The Changing Nature of American Jews’ Relationship to Israel and the Question of Jewish Unity

By Shaul Magid

…n. One of its founders, Chava Katz, wrote in 1970, “To talk about being pro- or anti-Israel is like saying, ‘Are you pro or against yourself?’” In the course of just a few decades a major transformation has taken place. As Waxman notes, “The era of ‘Israel, right or wrong’ is over. Nowadays, American Jewish support for Israel is much more complicated.” Progressive groups such as J-Street or Jewish Voice for Peace, who are openly critical of Israel…