Search for "CNN International cleantalkorg2.ru Headlines Videos Stories and Videos on News breaking newstoday bbc news news word BBC News World"

Pope Francis Praised for ‘Civil Unions’ Comment, But Justice Begins at Home—In the Vatican

By Mary E. Hunt

…runcated in the service of conserving outmoded theology. Third, the Pope’s words on civil unions, however well-meaning beyond an instrumentalist way of keeping the queer devil at bay, ring hollow. In light of his fulsome calls for world peace, an end to nuclear weapons and the death penalty, economic equality, and a halt to genocide, it’s odd and disappointing that he cannot gird up his cassock and find the gumption to affirm relational equality a…

Dear Reader, I’m Assuming You Don’t Know Any Muslims

By Haroon Moghul

…themselves at the center of a far vaster and very hostile Arab and Muslim world. To these Israelis I countered, “You do realize many in that Arab and Muslim world believe you are the aggressors—and are scared of you?” Many were surprised. But, I explained, they don’t see Israel standing on its own. They see it as a forward operating base for America, which is itself a continuation of European colonialism and hegemony. And it doesn’t help that Ame…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…ic Orient, becomes popular among American elites, and adapts itself to the world of for-profit fitness instruction. You might say that MNDFL is aiming to yogify mindfulness-oriented meditation. Yes, it’s the mind you’re stretching, not the muscles. But in both cases, a ritual practice has been repackaged as a service. In this branded form, it offers both health benefits and pleasure, and it can be delivered in the context of a straightforward cons…

Inside Outsourced: Come See Where Your Jobs Went

By Haroon Moghul

…m single mother in the hood who’s torn between protecting her daughter and running a drug ring she inherited, good luck! The latter is a script by new filmmaker Nia Malika Dixon, and would probably interest a more popular audience than a Hajj film. And for all the talk about bridging gaps between affluent immigrant Muslim groups and the longstanding African American Muslim community, this film would be an opportunity to show commitment to that goa…

Religious Belief Or Mental Illness?

By Jay Michaelson

…t twists; they’re genre twists, in which audiences are uncertain about the rules of the film’s world itself. Normally, this distinguishes films sharply from reality. At least under normal circumstances, mine is not a world of dinosaurs, ring-bearers, or talking animals. Films where characters turn out to be dead, or dreaming, or in the Matrix, thus, are distinct from ordinary life. Take Shelter, though, isn’t. Right before seeing the film, I read…

Sacred Real Estate: What Makes Washington’s WWII Memorial So Dreadful?

By Michael A. Elliott

…new symbolic register thanks to its role in the African American freedom struggle of the last century, particularly as the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory. Who knows what work it might perform in the future. And who can tell what the World War II Memorial might mean to Americans decades from now. If we are lucky, its unapologetic braggadocio will look like a historical aberration; if we are less so, it will appear as a warning of the shap…

Can Atheists Simply Ignore Theology?

By Eric Reitan

…learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion… Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity. It goes on, but that is enough to capture its flavor. Since Myers first published it, this bit of satire has been invoked widely by atheists who want to quickly dismiss those who think atheist critics of religion…

The Most Religious Race: Islam in Europe

By Haroon Moghul

…clarifies: the French military visited a comparable level of death and destruction on Algeria as affected Germany in World War II. This fact could explain why so many Algerians were so eager to get out of Algeria, if Caldwell only bothered to share it. But in the service of communicating a deep cultural unease with rapid social change, Caldwell has attempted to provide a veneer of neutral correctness (he has, in effect, internalized the multicultu…

Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

By Paul Wallace

…if that means stacking school boards and inciting legal battles? It’s the truth, and nothing justifies like the truth. Facing the Unknown But some churchgoers do not attend every Sunday in search of answers. These people understand the church not as a provider of answers but as a poser of questions. That is, for these Christians the task of he church is not to clear away mystery, but to deepen it; to teach its congregation how to bear mystery—and…

Francis Now and Then: The Ecological Politics of Saints

By Beatrice Marovich

…pre-industrial world that Francis occupied—and the type of ecological destruction that occurs in our world today would also likely have been incomprehensible to Francis. The human-tree political solidarity that women in the Chipko movement expressed was—in subtle ways—categorically different from the political solidarities we see in the stories that surround the life of Saint Francis. Let’s take the story of Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, for in…