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Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

…rganization (NGO) had registered 8,000 gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the Western and Central regions of the country which, if accurate, would represent a significant increase over past estimates. Within days, religious groups united to call on the Ghanaian government for action against sexual minorities. Both Christian and Muslim coalitions have declared that they will not support a politician who favors relaxing the laws covering homosexuality….

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International “Religious Freedom” Agenda Will Only Embolden ISIS

…rks to retrench the very divisions (Christian/Muslim, believer/unbeliever, western/non-western) that groups like ISIS depend on to cement and popularize a collective sense of identity and purpose defined in opposition to western states, Israel, Jews, and Christians. Prioritizing advocacy for religious freedom unwittingly reinforces the boundaries that feed ISIS’s fire. Undermining ISIS is a long-range project that involves, among other measures, u…

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French Theologian Urges Islam to Self-Critique, Fails to Notice Log in Own Eye

…vel headed cost-benefit analysis when it comes to discussing the crimes of Western armies, civilian dead, and where next to bring the civilizational goods of democratic modernity. This is the “we” whose public voice constitutes the consensus around shared national values. The problem with Marion’s “we” is not the way it assents to the specified content of liberal rights and secular values (indeed, such values are shared widely – beyond the West an…

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Dalai Lama’s ‘Suck My Tongue’ Controversy Reveals Centuries-Old Christian Distortion of Tibetan Buddhism

…a and awareness of the so-called “Tibet question” exploded into mainstream Western awareness. In 1989, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize “for advocating peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people.” Seemingly overnight, this religious figure exiled from a remote Central Asian territory was mixing with the Western glitterati. He was the subject of two…

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Buddhism And Politics in Myanmar: An Author Interview

…ntent, with other Theravada cases and also with writers and ideas from the Western tradition of political thought. Most of this had to be cut to make it a more Myanmar-focused book, but it’s all coming back in the next book, which is comparative across the Theravada tradition. (Also, I’m a bit ashamed to say that I didn’t fight hard enough to be able to keep the Myanmar language font in my bibliography. Not that it’s—yet—effectively searchable, bu…

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With This Largely Overlooked Shakeup is the Russian Orthodox Church Looking to Westernize? Yes and No

…n Anthony (Sevryuk) was until now the head of the Patriarchal Exarchate of Western Europe. Created in 2018, in direct response to the ecclesiastical battle between Moscow and Constantinople in Ukraine, the jurisdiction was created just as the Russian Orthodox Church set up rivals to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Spain and Portugal and in Southeast Asia. At the time, Metropolitan Hilarion explicitly stated that with the creation of the new…

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Russia and the US Have More in Common Than You Might Think

…rogram in which students from Russia, other post-Soviet states and various Western countries got along well and became friends. In my second year, however, a chill fell over the classroom. The Westerners sat on one side, those from Russia and Ukraine on the other—minus one Ukrainian who had dropped out—and the two student factions openly antagonized each other. The Stanford in Moscow program became officially defunct. In my third year, there were…

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Liberals Need Not Choose Between Sexual Abuse Survivors and the Religious Minority Communities That Failed Them

…), risks being seen as complicit in silencing victims of abuse. While most Western liberal politicians and media outlets have chosen the silent route thus far, Pakistani liberals who are far more concerned with the persecution of Pakistani Ahmadis at home have bravely chosen to speak out. In a Twitter thread on January 13 and 14, a leading civil rights activist, M. Jibran Nasir (often called the “conscience of Pakistan”) wrote: “More victims of se…

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Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

…book is similarly dry, but oh so full of important facts and syntheses of Western (and of course, sadly, male) intellectual thought about interactions between humans and nature. Glacken condenses 2000 years of Western thought about nature to three themes, the third of which I’m interested in here: “the idea of man [sic] as a geographic agent.” First, let’s jump ahead to data points about human impact on the natural world that Glacken didn’t have…

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Hey Hey, Ho Ho White Jesus Has to Go… But The Issue is More Complicated Than You Think

…e transition from a culturally specific depiction of Jesus as white within Western Europe, to the emergence of Jesus as a “white god” occurred during the period of Native American dispossession, African enslavement, and later during the era of colonization of Africa and Asia. The transformation of ancient and medieval color symbolism into racial discrimination and prejudice didn’t require graphic depictions of the divine, as David M. Goldenberg as…

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