Religion Dispatches
…nt power that its existence would be absolutely assured. Most Israeli Jews today, haunted by the same fear of powerlessness, still cannot believe in that assurance. People who are so preoccupied with their security—constantly on the alert for attackers, always fearing they might be “pushed into the sea,” feeling that their country is and must remain a psychological fortress—can hardly live a really normal life. Therefore, when judged by its own st…
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…h counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today—with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. It is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have the courage to remake…
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…re US-based Muslims will take up this challenge, acknowledging the gift of freedom and legal rights that God has given them in their residence here. In the book you “posit that there are real categories of people who can be called gay, lesbian, and transgender” and focus on what you call dispositional homosexuality. Why is this important? This argument is a legacy of the last two decades of academic debate about the epistemological category of se…
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…space of “doubt” in social movements. Jacoby notes further of the tendency today to “downplay secularist leanings” among pro-choice groups, highlighting instead liberal ministers and rabbis. This “timidity,” she writes, contrasts sharply with the “boldness” of nineteenth-century freethinkers. Stanton indeed wrote and lived bold, submitting before her audience the facts of a “candid world” in sixteen grievances—two of which directly address the ch…
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…of the country (the so-called Middle Belt), attempts to partition Nigeria today would leave the Muslim majority in the country’s northern third high and dry in economic terms. It would also plunge the religiously-mixed Middle Belt into endless chaos, as much based on the tensions between farmers and herders as on religious differences. Level heads in all parts of Nigeria, Christian and Muslim, realize the essential interdependence of all the coun…
Read More…gelical,” and in the 1990s, this was certainly not unusual, and isn’t even today. I’m not excusing it, I’m just saying this seems sort of inevitable if Obama is going to pick a conservative evangelical. The question is why he does. Whether this will cause the same uproar that Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his first inauguration remains to be seen, but already one can sense some the outcry brewing. But unlike with Wa…
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…important, however, that we consider religious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I…
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…rsalism. This popular history underscores continuities between the work of today’s human rights defenders and previous citizens’ struggles for the rights of women, workers, immigrants, and formerly enslaved and colonized peoples, placing Malala Yousafzai shoulder to shoulder with Frederick Douglass and Mary Wollstonecraft. In Moyn’s narrative, human rights are no older than Generation X. The eighteenth century discourse of droits de l’homme or “ri…
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…new groups of people. You also make it more available to commodification. Today, a studio like MNDFL can insist that it’s a non-religious space, even as it draws on religious traditions. “The secularization is explicitly designed to make [mindfulness] more marketable,” said Jeff Wilson, a Buddhism scholar at Renison University College in Canada and the author of Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Cultur…
Read More…sten, and especially to those who would not. Like the gays and lesbians of today, Jesus made enemies when he came out. Jesus angered his family, he angered his friends, and most of all he angered those in power when he came out against the greed, the neglect of the poor, the inequality, and the injustice all around him. Like many of the gays and lesbians of today, that coming out cost him his life. Coming out is not for wimps—it really does take a…
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