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How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

By Haroon Moghul

…housands of innocents were slaughtered in this war, as the ostensibly secular Pakistani military violently put down East Pakistanis whose votes had been summarily dismissed; this same military also empowered “religious” militias to assist in their efforts. And West Pakistan’s leading politician, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, childishly refused to accept the results of Pakistan’s national election, which saw his chance for power de…

White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

By Michael Schulson

…Charlie Hebdo Murders,” in which he explained that: The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action….They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West…They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve p…

Dear Readers: Letter From an Anonymous Liberal Pastor in Trump Country

By Thomas Warming

…of the congregation, born in the neighborhood and raised on her parents’ farm, married an Iranian man almost forty years ago. She was there for the tail end of the revolution and its aftermath, and says she was never treated poorly in Tehran, even in the days of mass street protests against the Great Satan. She and her husband have stayed married all this time, through all the ups and downs of Iranian-American relationships, splitting their time…

Setting a Low Bar: Religious Entities Praised for Treating Covid Religious Exemptions Responsibly

By Chrissy Stroop

…ed as good citizens in the fight against Covid, even though they clearly bear varying degrees of responsibility for making the extremists in their ranks feel welcome. In addition, their public statements on these matters cost them nothing, apart from perhaps a little discontent among their flocks. Take the example of the LDS Church’s Brigham Young University. BYU could choose to be among the over 1,000 campuses that already require vaccination for…

God’s Chosen Tweeters?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…udes churches, religious, and other spiritual groups, where internet and smartphone users are 15% more likely to be active than non-users. From photos of your last Habitat for Humanity project, to tweets that you’re powering off for the Sabbath, to prayers for sick friends and uninspired sermon-writers, social networking sites have become the connective membranes of contemporary social and spiritual experience alike. Data from Pew and other resear…

QAnon’s Predictions Haven’t Come True; So How Does the Movement Survive the Failure of Prophecy?

By Amarnath Amarasingam and Marc-André Argentino

…that’s responsible for all the evil in the world. The QAnon worldview is particularly prone to these sorts of predictions, and many adherents eagerly anticipate earth-shattering future events that will completely change the world, from “the Storm” (a near future apocalyptic realization when members of this evil cabal will be arrested) to the “Great Awakening” (a time when the general population will come to realize that they’ve been lied to for d…

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

By Eric C. Miller

As far as moral values go, gratitude isn’t particularly controversial. For the religious and non-religious alike, when good things happen in our lives we’re reminded to feel grateful. The failure to express this emotion is condemned as ingratitude, the disgrace of the ungrateful. In our polarized and often vitriolic public sphere, gratitude is increasingly offered as the antidote to negative feeling. But it’s not that simple. In his new book, The…

Politics in a Time of Crisis: Sandy? Blame Socialism

By Haroon Moghul

…ate campaign advertising in between CNN’s breathless coverage. Two ads in particular stuck out to me, for they indicated how differently we approach politics in a time of crisis. The first sequence of ads was all about the dangers of socialism and big government; some Hungarian refugee had bought up ad time explaining why he wanted to vote Romney and why we should learn lessons from the (read: his) past. We were warned of the dangers of redistribu…

Would Gandhi Disband Occupy?

By Ira Chernus

…seem like tomorrow’s folly. Gandhi’s program was especially vague in the earliest years of his work, in South Africa. To demand a detailed list of specifics from today’s Occupiers would be like making the same demand of Gandhi in the 1890s. Yet Gandhi must have known intuitively, even then, an essential truth he would later articulate clearly: The greatness of any society is not measured by its gross product, nor by the stellar achievements of it…

Notify This! Vatican Bungles Response to Sexual Ethics Book

By Mary E. Hunt

…ing the Book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” left many scandalized by the intellectually embarrassing and morally tawdry work of a group that obviously needs a permanent vacation. William Cardinal Levada and company at the CDF are simply out of their league theologically when it takes them six years (the book was published in 2006) to comment on an important work—and they still get it wrong…