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Normalization is Control: Telling Stories to Survive

By Mariam Durrani

…alization strategy makes me think of Gramsci and his prison notebooks. Similar to Hoodfar, he sat in an Italian prison trying to analyze the situation that he found himself in. Perhaps his brilliant conclusion can shed light on our current situation. Gramsci explained that control is not maintained through violence and political and economic force, but rather through the ideological, where the values of the elite become normalized as values that e…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…ders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for unity among Christian faiths, saying that “misunderstandings throughout history” h…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…$500,000, 3,000-square foot wing to his $800,000, 4,500-square foot weekend/retirement home nestled on 8.2 wooded aces in New Jersey’s tony Hunterdon Country. He needed the extra space for “an indoor exercise pool”—the house already has a large outdoor pool—“a hot tub, three fireplaces and a library.” Maybe he could have Boston Cardinal and Francis ally Sean O’Malley over for the weekend. The Franciscan lives in a “rundown rectory” in Boston’s Sou…

Air Kissing the Mezuzah: Religion and Science Collide in Fight Against Virus

By Shalom Goldman

…Jewish New Year) and at the end of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The plane circled in the Israeli skies and then flew north to the Golan Heights and south to Beersheba. The procession then returned to Ben Gurion Airport, having symbolically covered the extent of the Land of Israel. The rabbis were associated with an institution of Kabbalah Studies, the Nahar Hashalom Yeshiva. They were praying for an end to what they dubbed “the disease,” oth…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

…on baptism became an important marker of Eastern Christian identity—particularly as increasingly numbers of Eastern Christians became the simultaneous targets of Western crusaders and Islamic conquerors. In this context, rigid adherence to liturgical customs became a means by which to assert and preserve identity in the face of colonization and oppression. Conversely, adherence to Christian practices abandoned by the Christian West—if not in the M…

Norway Massacre Suspect Anders Behring Breivik, Hitler, & the Jerusalem Post Editorial

By Sarah Posner

…y many Western European nations. Undoubtedly, there will be those – particularly on the Left – who will extrapolate out from Breivik’s horrific act that the real danger facing contemporary Europe is rightwing extremism and that criticism of multiculturalism is nothing more than so much Islamophobia. While it is still too early to determine definitively Breivik’s precise motives, it could very well be that the attack was more pernicious – and more…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…oyim were born only to serve us.” Despite comments like these, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending. In the past month, Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the largest Jewish religious youth group in the world, called for the mass-murder of Palestinians and for their foreskins to be scalped and brought back as trophies, alluding to an episode in the Book of Samuel; and a Jerusalem cit…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…omed over the Assembly, the sisters officially called for gun control legislation and signed 800 postcards demanding Congress members to pass immigration reform. As LCWR past-president, Sr. Pat Farrell said to the Assembly, “Expressing what we really think and feel, with transparency and vulnerability, is for the brave of heart. It is, however, what we are being asked to do in our current conflict. All of a sudden the world is looking to us.” Lik…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…is declining. But their political strength remains much greater than their numbers. Yet curiously Lerner, the professional psychologist, downplays this and the other psychological wellsprings of support for militant Zionism. Instead he focuses time and again on compassion for the very real historical sufferings of the Jews. In his reading, the mainspring of Zionism was the need to “save ourselves from the hatred that would soon spawn the mass murd…

On the Taliban’s Hit List: An Exiled Pakistani Singer’s Plea to Save Music

By Austin Dacey

…a big majority are uneducated. There are verdicts from some very learned Islamic scholars who consider music bad only when it becomes vulgar in its lyrics and/or presentation. After the advent of Islam, Pashtuns have been staunch Muslims while listening and dancing to their music. A rich heritage of their folklore testifies to this fact. You’ve pointed out that even the Taliban have a musical tradition of their own. What is that? They are Pashtuns…