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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…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…ly imagine the weariness induced by the attempt to constantly acclimate to new hardware as well as new software. What do touchscreens have to do with encyclicals? This would have been an absurd question just ten years ago. But for today’s wired believers, if you don’t have a digital device, you probably won’t even read those encyclicals. Paper is so yesterday. The Pope’s 2011 observations about the dangers of social media are fairly astute, even i…

Christians Should Give Up “Christianity”: An Interview with Peter Rollins

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…world is meaningful but you don’t love, you cannot help but experience the world as meaningless. If you think the world is meaningless, but you are in love with life or with a person, you can’t help but experience the world as utterly meaningful. That’s faith for me—a material enactment of the beauty and depth of life. In America, faith has come to mean cognitive belief in something that lacks sufficient evidence. So, I can say I have faith that t…

Mark Driscoll Hate-Tweets as Pope Benedict Flip-Flops: This Week in Religion and Social Media

By Elizabeth Drescher

…k cousin who shows up at the dinner to which you’ve happened to bring your newest love. He’s embarrassing. He’s humiliating. And your new squeeze has to wonder if that particular kind of hate-filled crazy is somewhere in your gene pool. “How exactly are you related to him?” she asks. By week’s end, the tweeting pontiff, Benedict XVI, however, was offering a more temperate call to social media participation in his most recent message to the Roman C…

Republicans Charge Obama Is Anti-Catholic and Play Politics with Sex Trafficking Victims

By Sarah Posner

…ed information. At the heart of all this (apart from the obvious electoral politics being played here) is what’s wrong with the way federal faith-based funding has grown over the past several decades and how it is perceived by its recipients. Getting taxpayer money to perform services you believe are part of your faith mission doesn’t entitle you to require those you serve to live by the tenets of your faith, or to use that money to promote your f…

GMO or No: Problematic Intersections of Religion, Biotechnology, and Food

By Brittany Shoot

…consider if genetic modification will reduce or increase suffering in the world, or dukkha. If the world becomes sick, so will we. It is therefore imperative to avoid creating additional harm in anything we do. Genetic modification is not necessarily harmful, but in order for healthful products to have their intended benefits, it is important that producing them is carried out within healthful social, economic, and ecological frameworks. In an es…

No Turkey for Me: Confessions of an Indian Militant

By Johnny P. Flynn

…heir blood put the fires out. So the fires were ordered to be relit, three times. How do you make that out of construction paper? And then Governor John Winthrop ordered a day of Thanksgiving to be set aside: “Thus did the Lord judge among the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies.” We know that when the passengers on the Mayflower landed in November of 1620, the first thing they did, the very first act they perpetrated, was to rob the grave…

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

By Martyn Smith

…nd morals and transforming the invisible assumptions that shape the way we live and experience the world. And Herzog sees the relation of the net to religion, featuring a statement by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss: “We’re going to have a revolution not only in our technology, but in our theology. We don’t even have a name for it.” It can certainly be argued that the internet has taken over domains we traditionally assign to theology. For example, it…

Politics Threaten Utah Compact on Immigration

By Joanna Brooks

…to-nowhere approach like Arizona’s SB 1070, authored by Arizona legislator Russell Pearce, who is Mormon. The Compact, like other state immigration laws, also set the state of Utah on a collision course with the federal government. The framers of the Compact and Utah’s guest worker legislation hoped that taking a productive course of action would force the government to confront the necessity of comprehensive federal immigration reform. Utah’s Att…

Lying about Santa: The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

By Nathan Schneider

…ildren only became firmer in their self-assurance. Set against the general run of their ruminations, Hook’s history can only described as revisionist. Reminiscent of the internet cult-phenomenon Zeitgeist’s treatment of Jesus, it featured the standard ingredients of a turn-your-world-upside-down debunking. Before Santa Claus became Baby Jesus’ materialistic sidekick, we learned, he passed through a sequence of incarnations and permutations that go…