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Yankton Sioux Revive Isnati Coming of Age Ceremony

By Joanna Brooks

…return home to be with their relatives. What kind of support do our religious traditions give our daughters as they mature? How do we prepare them for and honor their transition into adulthood? What kind of imbalances and problems in our communities result from failing to prepare and honor young women? As a mother of two daughters and a feminist of faith from a strongly patriarchal tradition, these questions are never far from my mind….

Beyond Terry Jones’ Qur’an Burning

By Sarah Posner

…commanders as endangering the troops? (Surely the military has had its own problems with demeaning Islam.) Or do missionaries who proselytize to Muslims (because, after all, they love the Muslims but they’re lost without Christ) worry that these statements put them harm’s way? Are these Islam-is-not-alright provocateurs seen as freaky fringe characters with followers in the mere dozens, much less hundreds or thousands or millions? One is a best-se…

Feisal Abdul-Rauf Still not Providing Leadership on Park51

By Hussein Rashid

…we don’t build it the terrorists will come get us all. There are multiple problems with this line of thinking. It allows him to side-step the issue of the purpose Park51 by raising the issue of national security. This tactic is what got us into the Iraq War. It reeks of authoritarianism and fear-mongering. Rather than defending himself from a liberal, rights-based perspective, he capitulates the moral and legal high-ground and positions himself a…

Book Burning and the Scapegoating of Islam

By Eric Reitan

…nferno. Or, in the present case, Muslims are blamed for everything that is wrong with world—and, in lieu of burning alive actual human beings, the Muslim holy book is cast to the flames. So, What About the Crucifixion? Some, such as Christopher Hitchens, would see such sacrificial scapegoating as a natural extension of Christian theology—which, after all, has at its heart the doctrine of the vicarious atonement, which Hitchens finds an appalling e…

Shari’ah is Coming to America According to Conservative ‘Team B’

By Hussein Rashid

…ing included, like Matt Duss does). There is the David Yureshalmi, who has problems with Muslims, women, and people of color. Lt. Gen. William Boykin (ret.), whose deep understanding of theology allows him to say things like “my God is bigger than his God,” when referring to Muslims. And of course, Frank Gaffney is the head of the organization. As I said over a year ago, he seems to be more interested in job security than national security. This s…

The Ground Zero-Sum Game

By Reuven Firestone

…l stress. In the last decades it has been activated by economic and social problems and the increased numbers and visibility of Western Muslims. But the biggest boost to Islamophobia without question has been the appalling deadly attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the lethal bombings in London and Madrid, and the nature of reaction by key Western leaders to these events. Given the deep suspicion of Islam so deeply imbedded in…

US Evangelicals: A Case Against Their “Innocence”

By Darnell Moore

…order. The government should be concerned with helping them overcome their problems and not just punish them for it.” But what Lively, and so many other US evangelicals, must be aware of is the power of discourse—namely, ideology and theology—in shaping everything from our understandings of acceptable (read, normative) social behaviors to states’ laws. The bill is violent and problematic, but it is no less violent than the insidious ideas that for…

Is Islam Eco-Friendly?

By Amina Wadud

…get worse. This is also about process ethics. We are facing environmental problems much, much bigger than any one person, any one nation-state, even any one religion can resolve in one lifetime. The results of our actions will affect more than just our own “in-crowd.” There is no one solution, so we need multiple strategies at multiple levels. In Indonesia I lived in a community that could still be classified as a suburb of Jakarta. One distingui…

Catholics Urge Pope to Remove Bishop Who Ignored Child Sex Abuser

By Patricia Miller

…it or moving abusers from parish to parish was one of the major unresolved problems of the church’s handling of the child sex abuse scandal. Father Connell, a canon lawyer who is part of Catholic Whistleblowers, said in the letter to Pope Francis that canon law requires a “just penalty” for someone who allows harm to befall another by failing to exercise their ecclesiastical power. Catholic Whistleblowers, a group of nuns and priests working to ho…

Ex-Mormons Shouldn’t Proselytize Mormons… Really?

By Holly Welker

…paragraphs in the article about the psychological distress of discovering problems with the church’s truth claims, or the difficulty of finding someone with whom to discuss doubts, or the need to find a community beyond Mormonism, are somehow invisible to a reader. One of the earliest pieces I wrote for Religion Dispatches dealt with a commonplace Mormon complaint about ex-Mormons who “leave the church but can’t leave it alone,” as if anyone who…