Religion Dispatches
…titutionally (Turkey in NATO) or simply altogether and undeniably Western (Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo). These should be the basis of future relationships. We’re willing to pour billions of dollars into the machinery of conflict, but don’t want to sustain exchange programs, educational cooperation, or international visitors programs at nearly the same pace. We have the chance to; most Muslim countries, on the other hand, are too poor to do this. Such…
Read More…re was John Paul II’s plea that Muslim women raped during the civil war in Bosnia-Herzgovina should carry those pregnancies to term and turn those rapes into “acts of love.” It is especially in situations of war and massive displacement that girls are subjected to rape. And, not only do religious views on abortion result in abortion denied, US foreign policy contributes to their suffering. According to Save the Children, 80% of war rape victims ar…
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…olitical and media attention. Following the hearing, Bishop Andudu flew to New York to join human rights groups in urging members of the Security Council to take action. News organizations led coverage of their press conference with the Bishop’s call for intervention by the Security Council. Sudanese exile and human right groups organized a rally across from the UN. Hutson and the Bishop spoke along with a woman named Gedila Musa, a Nuban expatria…
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…it helps us get past the simple headlines—check out the front page of the New York Times today, suggesting the Iranian-Saudi rivalry is embedded in and involves all Sunni and Shia—but because this reader’s question inadvertently helps us understand why so many in the West and the Muslim world keep talking past each other. Here’s the reader’s question: Can you give me any insight into the apparently undying hatred of Sunni Muslims (e.g., the Saudi…
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…such as the Srebrenica massacre took place. Indeed, the wars in Rwanda and Bosnia have many similarities. Yet, the media coverage differed greatly. Fair-skinned Bosnians were contextualized, personalized, and humanized, while Black Rwandans were depicted as the undeserving Other. Whatever the color of our skin, we’re living on the same planet that’s currently beleaguered by overlapping crises, including racism, wars, the climate crisis, inflation,…
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…not substantive. The instances Breivik approvingly cites (say, the war in Bosnia) pre-date al Qaeda’s prominence by years. To try to construct a chronology of responsibility is not going to clarify the reasons for this massacre; or give us ideas on how to prevent it. The reason Muslim and Christian extremism resemble each other is because they are products of the same global processes, which transcend and subsume religions and regions and even na…
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…hen a presidential candidate for the United States and sitting governor of New Jersey says this, we shrug our shoulders and call it “politics.” Collectively, we are comfortable condemning the mistakes of the past, but never learning from them. As we turn Syrian refugees away, advocates for human decency pointed out that today’s refugee crisis had echoes to the Jewish refugee crisis of the early 20th century. Critics responded that the situation wa…
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…th, in a deeply religious family, I was horrified by the religious right’s new distortion of Christianity and its deleterious impact on national and international health policy. I wanted to make sense of how the religious right had succeeded in redirecting the national terms of conversation about sex: spouting ugly homophobia, reshaming women’s sexuality in particular, increasingly going after contraception and not just abortion, insisting that se…
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…here’s my mother’s recipe, here’s the kind of things we used back home in Bosnia, or back home in Burma. You don’t have to feel like I’m gonna get it right or wrong, I’m going say something bad about God, I’m gonna say something bad about Jesus. It allows a kind of personal basis for conversation. That would be a dream for this kind of work, to help foster a different kind of interreligious dialogue. I don’t know if it will, but it would be fun….
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…boring communities where some cases have been found.” In stark contrast to New Rochelle, a week earlier when a New York City woman who lived in Manhattan tested positive for COVID-19 after returning from Iran, health officials assured residents of New York City that the risks were very low and there was no need for quarantine measures. As New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a public press conference,“While we hoped this moment would…
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