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No, Sunni and Shia Muslims Have Not Been Fighting Forever

…art of a common Muslim world, and a shared peoplehood, which is apparently best expressed by suffocating any expression of dissent, going to war with one’s co-religionists, and demonizing opponents. If not brutally murdering them. If ever there were a need for some kind of secularizing sentiment, it would be here. But let’s also not forget that secularism emerged in religious communities—to prevent them from tearing themselves apart—and as such wa…

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What Do Christians Think About the Netanyahu Speech?

…m a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches,” represent 45 million Americans. It’s hard to imagine a more sharply defined divide between these two groups. CUFI supports sanctions against Iran, not what it calls a “sham agreement allows Iran to obtain a nuclear weapons capability.” It supports settlements and opposes peace talks with the Palestinians. It casts Netanyahu’s spe…

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Teaching the Dalai Lama’s Monks: Better Religion Through Science

“Do bacteria require light?” Tashi, one of my best students, wants to know. He sits there in Dharamsala, India, like his Buddhist monk colleagues, cross-legged on the floor in maroon robes, six hours a day learning science from a tall white Jewish guy from North Carolina. Religion often has a hard time of it, especially among academics, and especially among scientists. Of course academics have no problem studying religion and raising big money to…

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Do Atheists Borrow Religion’s Morality?

…ishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point… [W]e do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank… So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist…

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Take It Off, Or We’ll Make You: On Sarkozy’s Proposed Burqa Ban

…you. Since you have not been out in the world long enough to know what is best for you, we are going to spell out for you what is in your own best interest. First, you need to stop obeying men. Those men. Fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles, burly sons, imams, mullahs. You need to have a mind of your own. We understand that the peculiarly Muslim pathology is hard to overcome, but we urge you to struggle. Be bold. Make your own decisions. How do y…

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DeSantis is a No-Show, the Right’s ‘Secret Sauce,’ and Final Thoughts on Pray Vote Stand

…n his words, “Some of us believe we belong to the Creator who knows what’s best for us; others believe they belong to themselves and knows what’s best for them.” Any political belief that seems to be inspired by a Godless worldview, then, is automatically false. Backholm’s presentation loudly echoes Barna’s morning presentation and underlines a theme from the conference. The “biblical worldview” framework offers an opportunity to both inoculate ev…

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Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

…these conversations,” said Stutman, “and I still think synagogues are the best place for them.” Co-sponsored by J Street, the school’s J Street U chapter, and the New Israel Fund, the event was titled “Test of the Crisis in Gaza: Who We Are and What’s Next?,” an acknowledgement of the unprecedented polarization of American Jews produced by this summer’s war in Gaza. Stutman is, along with over 840 other rabbis and cantors, a member of the Rabbini…

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“We All We Got”: The Black Church As an Oasis in Baltimore’s Food Deserts

…time to change churches. In Baltimore, symbolic gestures on the pulpit are best complemented by concrete actions in our streets. Their hands forced, some of Baltimore’s black churches have stepped up to meet this demand. Prayer walks have been held by congregations at the same Penn-North intersection where CNN and others incessantly broadcasted images of a torched CVS as if it were a dying human being. In warmer months, New Bethlehem Baptist Churc…

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Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

…r, neither an omniscient narrator nor Emersonian Invisible Eyeball, is, at best, a recorder in a room, for a limited amount of time and recording on only one wavelength. We have the sounds of cooking, but not the smell or the taste of that fried fish. While offering us what we would otherwise not hear, this project also highlights limitations that are always on us. Such mapping exemplifies what anthropologist John L. Jackson, Jr. calls “thin descr…

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RDBook: The End of the World As We Know It

…Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”—probably the anthology’s best story—it’s a synchronistic series of unconnected acts of terrorism. The most original set-up is in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” in which a virus wipes out the human race’s ability to use and comprehend language. Elsewhere the cause of the apocalypse is ambiguous—something best illustrated in Gene Wolfe’s “Mute,” in which two children watch news reports about a mys…

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