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Utah Rejects Arizona-Style Anti-Immigrant Politics

By Joanna Brooks

…71% of Utah residents supported the guest worker permit provisions of the new law.) It is estimated that 50-75% (or more) of LDS Church members attending Spanish-speaking congregations in Utah are undocumented workers. Some sources suggest that Latinos make up the largest proportion of converts to the LDS Church in the US. LDS Church members report changes they’ve seen on the ground in the way the Church has moved over the last decade from couns…

In Trump Era, Young Muslims Question Respectability Politics of Mosques

By Hebah H. Farrag

…ing against these actions, with a major protest taking place last night in New York City’s Washington Square Park. To combat the continued vilification of Islam in the American public sphere since September 11th, American Muslim houses of worship and organizations have worked against policies that visibly target Muslims such as profiling, denial of First Amendment rights and harassment by law enforcement. In doing so, these institutions work to ga…

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…

An Untold Tale: American Fiction vs. The Religious Right

By Christopher Douglas

…it. When writers used the logic of multicultural identity to critique the politics of the Christian Right, they were misapprehending the phenomenon. The same holds true for postmodernism. It’s too easy to think of the uncertainties and indeterminacies of postmodernism as being naturally opposed to the theological certainty of the fundamentalism that is the backbone of the Christian Right. But what I try to show in my book is that postmodern uncer…

George Weigel’s Revisionist History Casts Vatican II as a Christian Nationalist Handbook

By Patricia Miller

…Church after 20 centuries of life.” As James Carroll recently wrote in the New Yorker, Vatican II was “an historic reversal of the Church’s panicked nineteenth-century repudiation” of the encroaching modern world. As such, it represented the church’s embrace of “pluralism, the separation of church and state, the primacy of conscience, the preference of experience over dogma, and—for that matter—freedom of the press.” But according to Weigel’s revi…

Talking With the “Religious Terrorist” that Turkey Wants Trump to Extradite

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…attractive to many is a notion of a modern Islam compatible with those who live active lives in multicultural milieus. This ideal of an engaged Islam has led his followers to establish hundreds of schools, newspapers, hospitals, social service projects, interfaith councils, and professional associations. My sense is that most of these projects are decentralized, created by the ingenuity of those inspired by Gulen’s teachings, and not orchestrated…

Herman Cain Doesn’t Know his Afghan from his Uzbek

By Haroon Moghul

…mov, is a holdover from the Soviet era. He is also easily one of the most brutal rulers in the world, and his regime is known for huge human rights violations. But nevertheless, because of its size, population, and a land boundary with Afghanistan, the Obama administration is making a deal with the devil, trying to shift more of our war effort through this country instead of Pakistan. Unfortunately the war to give Afghanistan a more enlightened go…

Beinart’s Indictment And The Evangelical Right

By Sarah Posner

…nd impending death of liberal Zionism. That the “establishment” (Beinart’s word choice, I suppose, to avoid the dreaded “Israel lobby” usage) is complicit in this atrocity is bad enough. But as Beinart so eloquently lays out, and which any sentient American Jew no doubt can see for themselves, this is done all while promoting a mythical — and deceptive — vision of Israel as the Middle East’s only democracy and the land of milk and honey, and playi…

To One Early 20th Century Rabbi Skeptical of Zionism, Passover Isn’t Simply A Celebration Of Freedom — It’s Also A Warning

By Shaul Magid

…hegemony; a story of freedom and a story of unfreedom? This year the incongruities are much more acute. Jews worldwide will sit at a Seder and tell this story while children starve in Gaza, while mothers become childless, while people become homeless, while the stench of death fills the spring air. They will sit and tell this story still traumatized by the ruthless murder of 1,200 in Israel (including both Israelis and non-Israelis). But it isn’t…

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…