Religion Dispatches
…ged crowd of Huguenots burst into the Chapel of St. Lawrence in Steenvorde France and proceeded to destroy with hammers and picks any ecclesiastical art that they came across. They toppled statues of Mary and the saints, destroyed crucifixes, smashed stain glassed windows, and defaced tombs. It was not an isolated incident, indeed it triggered a wave of iconoclastic fury that radiated north from France into the Low Countries, with cathedrals, chur…
Read More…Crimes reports that police in Beirut are using messaging apps on the cell phones of arrestees to try to entrap other gay men. In related news, the smartphone app Grindr, which allows gay men to find each other, announced it would permanently disable an option that allowed people to see their distance from other users. There have been reports that police in Egypt and Iran have used Grindr to hunt and arrest gay men. Jamaica: Activist Drops Challen…
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…sted that the bill was crafted to avoid ruffling the feathers of the large numbers of practicing Christians currently working in Quebec’s public sector—a less than insignificant number of which do happen to wear (typically small) crucifixes—and thus the visual code aimed its sights more narrowly on undesirable religious minorities, while at the same time allowing the government to proclaim the even-handedness of its approach. But whatever the act…
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…rliamentarians but especially [the recently defeated] President Sarkozy of France for their concessions to ‘diversity.’ So one should not be surprised to learn that the two books he chose to review are Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation by Robert S. Leiken (Oxford University Press, 2011) and After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent by Walter Laqueur (Thomas Dunne Books, 2012). Caldwell f…
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…was a response to Catharism, a dualist heresy that flourished in southwest France at the turn of the 13th century. A bloody twenty-year crusade stamped out the overt practice of Catharism, though underground its embers continued to smolder. Thus in 1231, Pope Gregory IX created the role of inquisitor, a “detective, prosecutor, and judge rolled into one,” as Murphy puts it. Usually a Dominican friar, the inquisitor moved fast, traveling with an ass…
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…in which he explained that: The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action….They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West…They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for d…
Read More…veiled, in black burkas that would be banned in other parts of Europe—like France. The thought flashes me back to the war over Bosnia. Are such burkas what the former French President, Mitterrand, had in mind when he told President Clinton that France would not stand for a Muslim-dominated nation in the heart of Europe? (Such words sound innocuous, but for their timing: During a genocidal war against that nation.) Over an hour in, and Sarajevo eme…
Read More…the burqa, McCarthy nonetheless suggested that the U.S. should be be “like France” and ban the burqa. Instead, he maintained, the way to “fight” shari’ah (or what he perceives it to be) is to “make them defend it… if you make them defend it, they will be marginalized, and we won’t have to worry about shrari’ah taking over America.” Watch: Listen to what McCarthy is saying: we’re not France, we wouldn’t ban anything, we’ll only marginalize our fell…
Read More…icion that I would be more like myself and not so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. I had stuck with this plan—umrah any time of the year, the further from the three sacred months the better, and then hajj some other year—until my recent stay in Indonesia. I met an Indonesian fashion designer who had one of those life-altering experiences about 15 years ago, after flaunting around in Milan, Italy, where she studied fashion. From that moment on, sh…
Read More…st Amendment Rights. And a bomb threat on Sunday at the shrine in Lourdes, France evacuated some 30,000 pilgrims just before the mid-day mass. Update from last week: The strippers and the churchgoers have reconciled . Good for them. After one season in the NFL, pro-football player Glen Coffee has given up football because he doesn’t think it’s God’s will for his life. “I don’t know what call God has for my life, but it wasn’t football. … I’ll be h…
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