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How to Prevent Ethnic Cleansing in Syria

By Haroon Moghul

…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…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ions from around the world. But there is something falsifying about this crude historical truism, the one claiming that religion enjoyed a tortured comeback of sorts in the year 2001. If anything, religion had already been “back” for a generation, by then. The really singular date for any contemporary discussion of the resurgence of politicized neo-traditional religion is 1979, not 2001. It was in 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionar…

The Risks of Remaining Neutral on Egypt

By Haroon Moghul

…me clear in the last few weeks, it’s the absence of leadership in the Arab world. I don’t just mean the unelected leaders of the Arab world, I also mean many of the institutions of Arab society. The most perceptive terrorism analysts have correctly pointed out that the more religious knowledge a Muslim has, the less likely it is that that person will fall for extremism. While this is useful knowledge insofar as it forces us to challenge easy stere…

Was Islam Responsible for the Boston Bombings, or Was “Internet Islam”?

By Ivan Strenski

…ng today are the skirmishes, back-stabbings, cavalry attacks and such of a worldwide struggle among Sunnis. Interestingly, and ironically, the Shi’a seem relatively far more settled. Hezbollah and the Ayatollahs may have their differences; the Iraqi Shi’a may worry about being swallowed up by their bigger Iranian brother. But, they do not charge each other with not being Muslims. Sunnis do that to Shiites and to each other. The Sunni world is in t…

How Did Hasidic Jewry Become a Stronghold of Trumpism?

By Shaul Magid

…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…

Rape and Richard Mourdock’s Semi-Omnipotent God

By Sarah Sentilles

…: they are revelations. They make visible the effect that theological constructions have on the world all the time. Mourdock’s logic (and I use that word generously) emerges out of a belief, held by 84% of white evangelical protestants, in a God who’s in charge of everything that happens in the universe. The danger of this version of God is that you can use it to sanction anything you’d like to sanction—no matter how violent or destructive or opp…

What the Fight over Allah says about the Future of Evangelical Christianity

By Richard Flory

…least the American culture that the mostly white, middle class evangelical world preferred. By World War II, the concern had broadened to the control of gender and sexuality. New rules were created, governing how and where men and women could interact and dress. Women were required to “cover up” so as to not tempt men with their sexuality, a force that apparently rendered men helpless. By the 1970s, what we now call LGBT issues were listed in all…

“Reason to Worry”: An Anti-Semitism Scholar Opens Up on Trump, Misogyny and the Future of Anti-Judaism

By Michael Schulson

…ncy to utilize arguments about Judaism to explain many of the problems the world confronts, whether they be in the Muslim world or in European countries, where there is a way in which thinking about Israel is a way of thinking about what is most in need of perfection in the world. We should probably worry more about something like these tweets because we’re in a space in which the use of anti-Judaism as a way of fantasizing the perfection of the w…

With the Death of One of the Last Three Shakers, an American Religious Tradition Takes a Step Closer to Extinction

By Ed Simon

…As I have written elsewhere, “Every religion is a world, every person is a world, and the destruction of either is a type of irredeemable apocalypse.” Individual religions are composed of their own unique metaphysics, ethics, cosmologies and theologies. The death of a religion is as the extinction of an entire world; the loss of a religion is the end of an entire universe. But we must remember that religions are not simply built out of metaphysics…

The Glorious, Ethnically-Challenged, Sisterhood of Spy

By Haroon Moghul

…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…