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Unnatural Disaster: When Conservative Theology & The Free Market Meet Wildfires

By Paul Harvey

…ected away from highly populated areas, fire is an enemy to be fought with military terminology, metaphors, and resources, as Professor Lloyd Burton of the University of Colorado, Denver, pointed out in a recent Denver Post editorial: … the news media mindset and resulting language of its discourse is saturated in metaphors of war. We are treated daily to visuals of ex-military aircraft bombing fires and structures with toxic fire-retardant. We ha…

Can Interfaith Dialogue Cure Religious Violence?

By Lucia Hulsether

…d—E pluribus unum.” Or, consider how after US newspapers reported that the military gave Osama bin Laden an “Islamic burial,” some interfaith responded by celebrating the moral resolve and pluralist ethic that inspires the US military to “treat even its worst enemy with utmost dignity”—never mind the years of torture, extrajudicial killing, and wars that provided background context. Such claims are premised on realizing the promise of a liberal na…

Syria and the American Apocalyptic Imagination: Isaiah 17:1 as “Evidence” of the End

By Jason C. Bivins

…rder of valuation, not so much abandoning the possibility or legitimacy of military action, or relinquishing altogether any claims to membership in society, so much as grounding any of these conversations in a different raft of evidence: texts and feelings working together to produce the real, the authentic so evidently lacking elsewhere. These varied forms of “evidence” and interpretation polarize citizens, since they make of shared tropes and te…

The Biggest Lesson Learned From the US War in Afghanistan is How Little We’ve Learned

By Sara Kamali

…gainst the Taliban onslaught in the past two decades. 2500 American servicemembers have also lost their lives in service of their country in Afghanistan. Afghans and Americans alike bear the physical and mental wounds of war. Perhaps the only lesson that has been learned has had too steep a price. To prevent ongoing devastation in the current landscape of perpetual warfare, and so that whatever formulation the presence of the US military eventuall…

The Far-Right Embrace of the Knights Templar isn’t Just About Faith, Tradition or History — It’s About Hate

By Thomas Lecaque

…0 Templar hoodie. Boykin, a former Lieutenant General, has become a pseudo-military-order figure himself, having claimed the position of Grand Chancellor of the Knights Hospitallers, Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, back in 2010. And joining up is just one facet of the obsession with medieval military orders in contemporary culture. There’s also the Crusader rifle made by Spike’s Tactical, with its Templar shield embla…

Putin Escalates Ukraine Invasion to ‘Cosmic War’ — But There is Hope

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…called “cosmic war.” It’s more than just a religious affirmation of one’s military; it’s lifting military combat into the high proscenium of spiritual battle. This is what Patriarch Kirill and now Putin have done with their war in Ukraine: turned it into their own cosmic war. Such wars never end well. Like the notion of “absolute war” described by the 18th century Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz, as long as a battle is conceived in cosmic t…

How 95% of Jewish Israelis Support a ‘Plausible’ Genocide

By Zachary Foster

…Israeli judge Aharon Barak claimed that it was in the “DNA of the Israeli military” to abide by international humanitarian law. In other words, Barak’s argument was not that Israel has not been committing atrocities, his argument was that Israel cannot commit atrocities. It’s a sort of impossibility. There is at least one obvious reason the “IDF are the good guys” myth is so effective among Israeli Jews: for most, service in the Israeli military…

Australian Church Leaders See Marriage Vote as Battle for Soul of Australia: Global LGBT Recap 10/30

By Peter Montgomery

…man and her father’s reaction to her coming out. … Morality crusades unite military regimes and religious zealots alike. Mr. Sisi, a former army general who became president after forcing out Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, understands the potency of connecting the catchall “national security” to “inciting debauchery” as a deliberate reminder that the Islamists do not hold the copyright on piety. (Mr. Mubarak, too, often vaunted his regi…

Mormons Prepare to March in LGBT Pride Parades Nationwide

By Joanna Brooks

…en taught my whole life?” For example, my eighteen-year-old son received a phone call from the bishop for an interview to set him on the road to preparing for his missionary service. So we are in the hall, and I’m telling him, “You need to call the bishop.” My son looks at me and says, “Mom, I can’t do this.” We talked over many things he was concerned about. One of them was that he has an openly gay teacher who, he told me, “is one of the most sp…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…