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Israeli Right Demonizes Israeli Left, With American Money

By Diane Winston

…sts against the forced eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.) On Feb. 7, the Jerusalem Post announced it had fired columnist Naomi Chazan after she and the New Israel Fund (NIF) threatened legal action against the paper. The Post, along with other Israeli newspapers, had printed an unflattering ad critical of Chazan and the US-based philanthropy of which she is president. After running the anti-Chazan ad, the Post subsequent…

Breivik’s Religious Pluralist Vision: A COEXIST Bumper Sticker Without the Crescent

By Michael J. Altman

…t’s true that he borrows a lot of imagery and language from the Christian crusades, such a list of world religions indicates that Breivik also thought in terms of modern religious diversity. It wasn’t merely Christendom versus Islam, it was a world of peaceful religions defending themselves against violent Muslims. Combining the clash of civilizations thesis with historical narratives of Islam’s violence against the world’s religions, Breivik saw…

‘Spooky Action’ of Quantum Physics Offers an Alternative Frame for War in the Middle East and the 2024 Election

By Peter Schwartz

…d in the United States (Russia too, for that matter). In my lists of saved news stories, for instance, articles about the decline of religiosity exist side by side with articles about how a reactionary Supreme Court has elevated “religious freedom” above all other freedoms and rights, about how the Right is turning religion into identity. This paradox exists around the world, representing a turning-inward, rather than a turning-toward—a fractal ro…

Knighting Viktor Orbán for ‘Defending Christianity,’ Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Demonstrates That ‘Culture War’ is the Only Theology That Matters to the Global Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…stic sphere as a fortress of virtue against an increasingly corrupt and corrupting world. It’s in Romanticism that we first see the family celebrated as “natural,” sanctified, and optimal. Nationalism takes up this Romantic celebration of the family and extends it, arguing that one’s nation (and specifically one’s ethnic or racial group) constitutes a kind of extended family imbued with all of the holiness now attributed to the biological family….

Syria and the American Apocalyptic Imagination: Isaiah 17:1 as “Evidence” of the End

By Jason C. Bivins

…bility and Syrian chaos, together standing for the violence of ontological breakings into and breakings down of the “communal World” as it appears to custom, and figuring equally in the restoration or defense of such worlds. So “religious enthusiasm” or the American apocalyptic can be read as modes of the disaffection of the citizen in a time of political delegitimation. We often see this “religion” taking shape most clearly when we focus all the…

‘Russkii Mir,’ the Russian Equivalent of ‘Blood & Soil’ Ideology at the Heart of Putin’s War, Explained and Rejected by Theologians in New Statement

By Daniel Schultz

…or the American scene. The statement sets its organizers in opposition to “Russian World” (Russkii Mir) teaching, which is essentially a contemporary Russian version of the Nazis’ “blood and soil” ideology. As the authors explain, Russian World teaches that “there is a transnational Russian sphere or civilization, called Holy Russia or Holy Rus’, which includes Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (and sometimes Moldova and Kazakhstan).” This Russian world…

Turning Students into Citizens, Religious Studies Edition

By James Miller

…housands of young people can think critically about the nexus of religious worldviews, values and politics that shapes the diversity of the world’s responses to climate change, rather than the religious ideas of Medieval Chinese Daoism (which is how I began my academic career)! Ivan Strenski is right that the discipline of religion needs scholars who are purely focussed on the academic problems of religion. But this is not what the vast majority o…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…ama’ Mosques of South Asia (India and Pakistan.) Another argument for Shah Rukh Khan as Caliph. ⬆ The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa (Khalifa Tower), anchors the misleadingly-named ‘Old Town’ of Dubai, which is a new development made to look like a traditional Arab neighborhood. That is next to the world’s largest mall, though second largest by leased area: the Dubai Mall, which is a great place to get lost and start crying out o…

Orlando Tragedy and the Tangled History of Jihad and Homosexuality

By Ali Olomi

…eliberately and in opposition to the broader historical arc of the Islamic world. One cannot ignore how Omar Mateen’s homophobic violence contrasts with the valorization of homoeroticism in Rumi. Or how he committed his heinous acts during the month of Ramadan, a holy month of fasting for Muslims and a month that calls upon the faithful to make peace. That Omar Mateen abused his ex-wife is not coincidental. Violence against sexual minorities goes…

Enlightenment’s Islam: A “Necessary Fiction”

By Rob Goodman

…c for all of these thinkers, and they implanted that faith deep in our own worldview. But it can jar our sense of progress just to read their words today. When we read Gibbon’s effort to reimagine a centuries-old enemy of the West—alongside, say, the fact that outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann raised more than $1 million in 25 days from a Muslim-themed witch-hunt—it’s easy to ask how such openness could curdle into such paranoia. But that would be to…