Religion Dispatches
…that only an American would be concerned with. But Kulah thought they were promoting his document. The other thing, regarding President Obama: do you remember when Gene Robinson was invited to be part of his [inauguration], there was a lot of outcry from the American conservatives? One thing that was interesting was that [Rev. David Runnion-Bareford] the leader of the Association for Church Renewal, wrote a letter to Obama saying this will be seen…
Read More
…Australians, 15 percent of residents of United Kingdom, and 12 percent of Western Europeans. More than two-thirds of Americans said they would suffer stigma in their community and 61 percent said they would suffer stigma from their family. When broken down in by region in the U.S., those who live in Southern states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee (and North Dakota) reported the highest fear of social stig…
Read More
…e graveyard be left intact and the ER built in another place. In any other Western country, such a confrontation between secular and religious authorities would have ended with the government getting its way, and with religious leaders girding their loins for the next church-state confrontation. But the Israeli parliamentary system renders the government vulnerable to pressure from its many coalition partners. These coalition partners are rewarded…
Read More
…ourth and ninth centuries. Such relics were prized in both the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom because the moments each became an object of religious significance were recorded so clearly in scripture. As the church expanded far beyond its Mediterranean origins, relics served as a kind of portable sanctity—if you couldn’t go to the Holy Land, the Holy Land could come to you. Most of these objects have their roots in legend, but they al…
Read More
…ea of what it is they believe. I hope my book gives people a sense of what Western religious traditions and regular people say heaven is (and isn’t) and how those ideas have changed through history. I hope that my book will provoke readers to develop for themselves a clearer and more thought-out idea of heaven, whatever that is. Personally, I am in an awkward place. I am a progressive in my heart and I don’t like conservative visions of heaven tha…
Read More
…uzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhis…
Read More
…would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization,” he told Christianity Today in 2005, “for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.” At the pinnacle of Haggard’s power, he moved seamlessly between the firebrand populism of evangelical believers and the institutional halls of fundamentalist realpoliti…
Read More
…he context of domestic Iranian politics. Playing to anti-Semitism and anti-Western attitudes may be his only hope as he runs for reelection on a failure to deliver the end of poverty and powerlessness promised during the last campaign. What makes less sense is why some of his fellow Muslims have not denounced this anti-Semitism more vigorously. The creation of the State of Israel was a product of a Jewish nationalist movement that arose at the end…
Read More
…am and were willing to adapt their religious practice in order to fit into Western society. In the end, Caldwell does not delve into the social, economic, and migratory conditions that form the experience of many Muslims in Europe. An understanding of Muslims in Europe today cannot be achieved through facile analyses of a monolithic Islam; but instead in the unpacking of several important assertions that tend to conflate Islam, immigration, and so…
Read More
…11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed boasting, “I know that the materialistic Western mind cannot grasp… how this works.” Such savvy, so removed from MIT or the complexity theorists at the Santa Fe Institute, runs in tension with Bousquet’s master narrative that links scientific war-making with elite scientific fads. But works like Olivier Roy’s Globalized Islam show how network-consciousness has infiltrated contemporary Muslim cultures through infor…
Read More