Religion Dispatches
…haunts most political and religious crises today, especially in the Middle East. Secularized Post-Zionism is just as shallow as secularized Zionism: Secularist clichés of New York, romantic fulfillment, and father-son reconciliation offer nothing new to the displaced Israelis of the films. More highbrow than The Zohan, Restless takes itself too seriously and descends into melodrama, while the mass-marketed Zohan, with its ridiculous gags and stere…
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…he Graves of Tarim, a new, peaceful, entirely non-militarized trade linked East Africa to China. (He’s at Duke University.) The artistic and aesthetic legacies from these periods speak for themselves. The Alhambra Palace in Granada, which so inspired Washington Irving. The Taj Mahal in Agra. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul. The wonderful domes of Isfahan. But within a few centuries, all these lands were under foreign rule, their populations subjugated…
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…iod—came to symbolize the backwardness and even barbarity of the Christian East and was used to place Eastern Christians and traditionally Eastern Christian cultures outside of the parameters of the “West.” It did not and does not matter that Christianity was a significant pillar around which “Western” identity was built. Eastern Christians simply came to be seen as somehow not fully Christian. Nor did it seem to faze anyone that ancient Greek cul…
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…) It’s a great time to be an Jewish American activist working for Middle East peace. I know that sounds strange. Israel is once again devastating Gaza. The Palestinian death toll is rising steadily. Even the more liberal Jewish-American groups like the Reform movement and J Street were at least initially sympathetic to Israel’s attack on Gaza, despite the fact that the attack (no doubt intentionally) destroyed a real chance for peace with Hamas….
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…end of WWII, the blood libel left Europe and was resurrected in the Middle East. The alleged Jewish longing for blood, no longer Christian, was now often represented as money or land. The Arabic translation of The Merchant of Venice, for example, presents Shylock seeking not a pound of flesh from Antonio, but, as a Zionist, appropriating land from Arabs. The Middle East blood libel has evolved to include charges of Jews drinking Arab blood, serial…
Read More…lity of peace has been sitting in a drawer ready to be implemented for at least 15 years, and most of us think Christian Zionism is an impediment toward peace in the Middle East.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has reported that about 20 to 40 million Americans are Christian Zionists. “I would say the whole flier seems to me to be describing a stereotype of a Christian Zionist,” Brog said. “There are some Christian Zionists who are oppo…
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…reate a different kind of impetus for change in their region of the Middle East? The rise of a new nonviolent popularism in the Middle East may seriously undercut the viability of the jihadi image of violent social change. On the other hand, a significant number of failures of nonviolent resistence may lead to a violent backlash once again. Not all protests will end like Tunisia and Egypt. Others will be ruthlessly crushed, as was the Green Revolu…
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…significant contribution the new Obama Administration could make to Middle East Peace would be to embrace an alternative strategy: that homeland security is best achieved through generosity and caring for others. If the United States were to announce its embrace of a Global Marshall Plan, beginning with the Middle East and backed up with money and the conscious articulation of a Strategy of Generosity, it would do more to help Israel than all the…
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…very well be that Carson simply relishes holding on to a belief that, at least on the surface, appears to uphold Biblical authority over scientific consensus. Yet, considering Carson’s staunch support for Israel and his recent vague promise to “take land” from the “global jihadists,” it’s worth probing further what imposing the Biblical narrative on one of the Middle East’s most significant archaeological sites means to him and his constituency….
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…rl Sagan, and Dan Brown’s popular religious mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code. Sagan has a reputation as a proto-New Atheist, but his novel suggests he was intensely sympathetic to religious experience and authority. By the end of his novel he has his scientist protagonist embark on a career of “experimental theology” after she has discovers the “signature” of God in the very structure of the universe. At the same time, Sagan was not impressed b…
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