Religion Dispatches
…ral quandaries they inspire. “You call them universal rights; we call them western impositions . . .” you get the idea. These days, in the desperate search for new markets, corporations seem to care less whether they are truly open markets. The cooperative rule of law is detachable from the competitive rule of the global marketplace. If it takes submitting to governmental regulation, however intrusive, to get into the local market, then so be it….
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…vangelicals, and the United States’ claim to being exceptional in escaping Western Europe’s radical de-Christianization, Gallup reports that fewer than 50% of Americans declare membership in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Yet, despite the decline of organized religion, the latest book from French political scientist Olivier Roy, Is Europe Christian?, argues that until quite recently, it could still be said that Europe and America reflected a cont…
Read More…iour is largely blamed on the West. Meanwhile, the loudest and most public Western influence on this issue arguably comes from Western preachers, like Pastors Rick Warren and Scott Lively, who actively fund and promote homophobia in Africa In neighboring Nigeria, a draconian anti-gay law passed the House at the end of May. While international human rights advocates have mounted a campaign this month calling on the country’s president not to sign t…
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…ups. The idea is that oppressions are all alike because they are caused by western white male heterosexual Christians. Everybody else forms a single nation—or rather, political party—with similar interests and a common platform. The problem here is that this worldview does not account for the many places where the various subgroups of this ‘party of the oppressed’ are actually in tension. An Orthodox Jewish man (marginalized by his religion) askin…
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…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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…we can refrain from absolute judgments. Maybe, for example, we can leave open the possibiilty that the spiritual practices of privileged people partake of privilege without being reducible to it. And maybe we can allow that some relationships between Western travelers and non-Western hosts might not be defined exclusively in terms of the dynamics of power, even while we continue to ask pointed questions—and for that kind of rhetorical generosity w…
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…ple you wanted to…? There are Islamophobic statements in the United States today where, if you replace the word “Muslim” with “Jew,” it sounds very familiar. I don’t know about contemporary Islamophobia. There are plenty of moments in which anti-Judaism serves as a template for attacking other group. With contemporary Islamophobia, I hesitate just because in some ways, it’s already such a polemical argument. It’s very often used to say, “Don’t tal…
Read More…s persecuted for its sexually enlightened philanthropy. It’s complex motivations like these that lead many to believe that they’re just one more example of Western organizations using African problems as a prop to promote their own interests….
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…and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has similarly criticized such practices. Western appropriations of non-western traditions that emphasize mindfulness, inner peace, disinterest, non-attachment, and so on function for Žižek as “the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism.” That is, they “represent the most efficient way for us fully to participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.” Mindfulness practices, in ot…
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…ual acts, but thanks to draconian laws that forbid activism while allowing Western evangelicals to promote homophobia, Ethiopia is on track to join their ranks. “In many countries, it’s getting better for the LGBT community,” says reporter Katie J.M. Baker. “In Ethiopia, it’s getting worse.” She writes that anti-terrorism and anti-advocacy laws, both adopted in 2009, mean that “there are no health centers, charities, publications or even nightclub…
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