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When Religion is a Refuge for Scoundrels: ‘Ryan Budget’ Edition

By Daniel C. Maguire

…ional authority with universal jurisdiction.” Pope after pope call for a “true world political authority” and a “world bank” to preside over a “global, universal common good.” Nations need to “transfer a part of each nation’s powers to a world authority and to regional authorities.” What is called for is not a tyrannical despotic world authority. The Catholic tradition of “subsidiarity” means that nothing should be done by a higher authority that…

What’s Ahead in the World of Mormonism for 2011

By Joanna Brooks

…ney. However the Republican primaries turn out, the prospect of a Huntsman run may remind the world that Mormonism is as capable of producing urbane, globally-minded moderates as it is of producing Cleon-Skousenite-Tea-Party ideologues. (Not to mention a few liberals.) And that would be a welcome reminder indeed. Years ago, a high-ranking LDS Church official was reported to have compared working with Elder Boyd K. Packer to trying to “stage manage…

Is Sam Harris Really a White Supremacist?

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…s a white intellectual targeting a vulnerable minority. A largely positive New York Times review of The End of Faith could include, just in a few sentences near the end, that the reviewer felt some discomfort with Harris’ obsessive focus on Islam. Revisiting The End of Faith twelve years later, though, it’s striking to see how incessant, and how flimsy, Harris’ charges against Islam really are. In the opening pages, Harris invites his readers to i…

Confronting the Rise in Conspiracy Thinking … With Wisdom Literature

By Daniel Schultz

…and prosperity, and neither will exposing the pedophile conspiracy choking world government, nor will re-installing Trump as president, nor sending him off to prison forevermore. We are always faced with the responsibility to make choices, and the anxiety that goes along with it. We have that anxiety because, last, not everything is under our control. Walter Brueggemann says it best: “In spite of our best planning, there is an inscrutable mystery…

Don’t Overlook Endless War in Rise of ISIS

By Haroon Moghul

…s, Zionists aimed to colonize Palestine, and the Russians wanted the Bosphorus. World War I gave them their chance. But let’s focus on Iraq. Largely Indian forces, mostly Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus under British command, seized Baghdad from the Ottomans by the end of the First World War. The modern nation of Iraq was born when the British fused three former Ottoman provinces, with major demographic differences between them, and gifted them to a Kin…

Frodo and Mormon Share Stage in South Park Mormon Musical

By Seth Perry

…st moments and for what will most likely be perceived as its deepest incongruities. The incongruity comes from the ease with which the Ugandans and eventually the missionaries embrace this metaphorical model of religion. The central female character, Nabalungi, takes Cunningham’s stories literally, and against the backdrop of her blighted village sings a wrenching song about reaching the storied paradise, Salt Lake City, where, she imagines, the w…

State of the Union Stuck in that Olde-Time Semi-Niebuhrianism

By Ira Chernus

…ians groaning from their graves in disbelief. But, hey, this is the New World where the frontier has traditionally offered the eternal lure of new beginnings and limitless wealth, even for the poorest-born. At the core of the American belief in social harmony is the myth of a classless society. Other nations are still caught in the snares of age-old class conflict while we have only the one great class: the middle. That economic fiction has…

6 Years Later, Arab Spring May Only Have Just Begun

By Haroon Moghul

…, suffers the world’s greatest brain drain; Russia’s economy is in the doldrums; and Assad only rules through astonishingly brutal force.) At some point, though, terrible violence ceases to have its intended effect, as perverse as that may sound. Imagine what happens when dysfunctional religion meets radical insurgency meets huge refugee flows, mass dislocations produced by a severe climate and an ugly geopolitical alliance against democracy, plur…

QAnon’s Predictions Haven’t Come True; So How Does the Movement Survive the Failure of Prophecy?

By Amarnath Amarasingam and Marc-André Argentino

…bal of satanic pedophile elites that’s responsible for all the evil in the world. The QAnon worldview is particularly prone to these sorts of predictions, and many adherents eagerly anticipate earth-shattering future events that will completely change the world, from “the Storm” (a near future apocalyptic realization when members of this evil cabal will be arrested) to the “Great Awakening” (a time when the general population will come to realize…

What Role Should Religion Play in the Public Square? — A Black Christian and a Black Secular Humanist Debate and Discuss

By Brad R. Braxton and Anthony B. Pinn

…e world. BRAXTON: A “grammar of compassion”—that’s a beautiful phrase. The world surely needs more compassion. I won’t begrudge people about whether their motivation for compassionate problem-solving arises from religious or secular sources. We just need to address these public problems. When teaching in divinity schools and seminaries, I remind students that prophetic religion involves more than simply naming social problems. Constructive and ima…