Religion Dispatches
…except for a dream about storage arrangements that included a friend from Malaysia my daughter’s cat and one of my children, no bells rang, no guns went off. My daughter kept her promise to make me breakfast and I kept my promise to myself about it: wait for her no matter how late, rather than jump the gun because I’m an early riser. Truth be told, my children have come to that place where it’s very hard to know what to do for a person who demand…
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…re inseparable — sharing a common enemy, pluralism. Of late, Indonesia and Malaysia have flirted with such behavior. This trend is hardly confined to Muslim-majority societies. Buddhist Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Hindu India, and Christian Uganda and Zimbabwe have done their share of official hate-mongering. So has the United States’ principal ally in the Middle East, Israel. As David Sheen has noted in these pages, none other than the former Chief Ra…
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…o stop five times a day, to assume these postures, to utter this un-self encoded message, makes a difference, not to God, but to us, here and now. Sometimes people think but why pray five times, or how can you pray five times, Isn’t that a lot? Doesn’t that take a long time? Actually, the simplest performance takes less time than it does to smoke a cigarette, but no body every asks the office worker from the 38th floor, who has to go outside becau…
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…e last month when I participated in a five day international conference in Malaysia which brought together 250 women from 47 countries, many of them predominantly Muslim with strong links between religion and state. The conference launched the Musawah Movement, a loose network of Muslim women’s groups working to ensure that Muslim family law recognizes and operationalizes the equality of women within the family. Muslim feminists are as diverse as…
Read More…relatively high proportion of deeply devout Muslims, so any suggestion of promoting secular lifestyle inevitably meets resistance. Intolerance for sexual minorities extends far beyond conservative religious circles, however. Uganda: Officials force cancellation of pride celebration Kuchu Times reported that Pride Uganda 2017 had been cancelled due to police harassment and threats from Simon Lokodo, the intensely anti-gay Minister for Ethics and I…
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…s live in democracies: Mali, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia, among other countries, with 700 million Muslims; more than half the planetary total. Other millions of Muslims live in majority non-Muslim dictatorships, such as Russia and China. But the best proof of Islam’s allergy to liberty is found in democratic Senegal. Independent in 1960, this 90%-Muslim country proceeded to elect a President, Leopold Sengh…
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…help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5th, 2024. It’s a great revival. “Upon taking office…” Trump makes several concrete policy promises that flow from this White Christian nationalist vision. It’s not worth quoting Trump’s rambling justifications for the policy proposals he connects to this worldview. Lest anyone think Trump’s White Christian nationalism is empty rhetoric, however, this speech also included promi…
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…that Trump’s enemies are possessed by demons, while the Trump campaign has promoted the idea of “prayer warriors” fighting the forces of Satan. Not surprisingly, many Christian leaders promised that the January 6 insurrection would be a reckoning with the “demonic influence” that “stole” the election of 2020, and there’s strong evidence that “figures within the Trump White House were strategizing with” the prayer warriors of the New Apostolic Refo…
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…xt—and 10th—annual conference. Same place, same time, in Poland, in October 2024, but the importance of secrecy seems to be paramount for the IFTCC. Indeed, a recent newsletter to registered members warns: We would like to remind you, in order to ensure a safe and secure environment for everybody, the conference will be non-public and by invitation only. Please DO NOT post this information on any website, nor on social media. The new registration…
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…” amount of force or “too little” force in Gaza, according to a mid-January 2024 poll. That’s 95% support for a plausible genocide: Image: The International MA Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at the Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University Polling data from the Agam Institute suggests that some 60% of Israeli Jews oppose allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. That is, 60% of Jewish Israelis believe all 2.2 milli…
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