Religion Dispatches
…the women who straddled the divide between living Islam and living in the world today, so they challenge Islam to stay true to their realities. Then it was okay for me to let go of the cumbersome identification and have both Islam and human rights. There really never was a conflict in the first place; just a set of circumstances that caused the confusion that one had to choose between one and the other, instead of living both. Islamic Feminism So…
Read More…or? Something is terribly wrong when a man who admits he violated U.S. and international law—a man who also lied to the American people and started a war based on faulty intelligence that has cost thousands and thousands and thousands of lives—is invited to celebrate his book release on Oprah. My fear is that the lack of outrage and the lack of accountability prove that people in the U.S. just don’t believe torture is wrong. What’s the big deal? I…
Read More…” For many Muslims, Islam does not mean conflict; it means submission, to truth and to peace. The unleashing of towering new political energies in the Muslim world present an opportunity for Muslims to hold fast to their highest ideals and for non-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not d…
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…se draconian and inhuman interpretations of Islamic law (so, keep in mind, Rumi was an Islamic lawyer, and furthermore he was much more qualified than the Taliban could ever claim to be). Given that impression, 30% of Oklahohamans still voted “no.” These Oklahomans didn’t want to ban international or Shari’ah law from their state courts. Because they see through the feint, the misdirection, the pointing to supposed threats in place of the actual c…
Read More…Second Coming is still a long way off. Watch it here. TV Guide provides analysis here. While we can all breath a sign of relief over Cameron’s calm assurances, isn’t the fact that a major news organization tapped Growing-Pains-star-turned-religious-nut as an “expert” on the subject of anything one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?…
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…inevitability, but that we must know what to look out for. While the Arab world is struggling to establish its own democracies, we must pay attention to the absence of larger, regional structures, through which conflicts can be resolved, tempered, or contained. Already, the region is split between alliances of powers, and lacks mechanisms by which countries can talk to one another. Democracies are far better at this than autocracies, but either w…
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…might end up hating Aristotle; another loving him, and the same would be true for Woolf, or Rawls, or any of the other powerful and world-shaping ideas we encounter. All of these outcomes are successes. Fundamentally, then, any theology appropriate to a public university would have to be released from Christian ownership, meaning from any Christian monopoly on the idea. Let’s provisionally imagine a new idea, then. Let’s call theology that conste…
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…gogue and park closings turn into Trump rallies in Hasidic Brooklyn? It’s true that Trump espouses conservative values that many Hasidim identify with, but so did Ronald Reagan and he didn’t enjoy such passionate support. And Reagan arguably did more for Hasidim than Trump ever did when, in 1984, he granted them “disadvantaged minority status” enabling them to apply for federal funding for businesses. Whether, in fact, this speaks to a significant…
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…eas with “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World.” Basically, these problems have to do with the definition of religiousness, the metric for altruism, and the concept of world. Let’s take them one by one. Problem 1: “The Negative Association between Religiousness….” Scholars of religion are fond of explaining all the reasons that religion is really, really difficult to define. The more cynical among…
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…they have more in common than they want to know. They’re women in a man’s world, making it their own world, and having a wonderful time on the way. But should they be? Boyanov is cruelly honest, and fetching for it: She knows what she wants and says what she thinks—which is what we’re thinking—though we lack the courage (or liquid assets) to. Cooper discovers her inner strength, and is freed by it. Boyanov is wealthy, and can afford to be herself…
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