Religion Dispatches
…th. Is this really our only role? We should stop falling for this trap because the same media that parade the vigor of our faith will be first to condemn our anachronism and moral fragility. A manicured image of Islam isn’t working because we have turned our desire for normalcy into a dogged campaign of hushing our diversity. Simply producing compensatory positive images of Islam and Muslims is akin to what British-Pakistani novelist Hanif Kureish…
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…he first place? Like the Dutch TV producer wrote, isn’t he a dangerous man promoting hatred? Is he no different from Muslim extremists who insist on seeing the world in black-and-white? It is easy to make this comparison and argue that Wilders is an extremist in his own right. But any use of that word must be balanced: Muslim terrorists and Western Islamophobes are not mirror images of each other. For all the ugliness of his views, Wilders has not…
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…eist who exposes severe apostasy laws in Muslim countries, and an unveiled Saudi female student in Canada who keeps a diary against veiling. And the site’s Art section promotes controversial photo galleries on beauty and veiling, cultural and gender identities in Islam, and the use of humor in the Syrian war frontlines, among other things. As a critical space, Free Arab should be commended for promoting individual rights and civil liberties in the…
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…out how people use their cellphones, they’re entering vague territory, because there’s no agreed-upon definition of “use.” I’d wager hard cash that if you asked the exact same question about churches after priming people to think of Bible apps, those opinions would be very different. “Oh, that kind of ‘use’! That’s generally okay.” From Etiquette to Ethics This brings us to our second insight, which is that it’s very hard to measure etiquette thro…
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…exual abuse in SBC churches, notes that “senior SBC leaders appeared to excuse abuse and/or support accused abusers… while at the same time survivors were ignored or treated poorly.” To put it mildly, we were not surprised. Nearly four years ago to the day, an RD headline read: “SBC’s #MeToo Problem isn’t a Rotten Apple, It’s a Rotten Tree.” In addition to its handling of individual cases, the report is also highly critical of the SBC Executive Co…
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…rnate plane of existence. Second, “myths” brings us back to South Korean amusement parks. They remind us that there is much more to culture than cold hard facts. (Otherwise, how could we have Fox News?) The popularity of a myth like creationism depends on social dynamics, publicity, and specific institutions of power. To combat it, evolution needs more than just the hard facts. It needs counter campaigns, educational efforts, and maybe even amusem…
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…In 1954, Senator Lyndon Johnson presented an amendment to Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3), which was subsequently adopted by Congress. The amendment defined nonprofit tax-exempt entities—including churches—as those “which [do] not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” During the recent election cycle, the…
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…’t know. Most Americans are against human cloning and most are against the use of steroids in sports. But I think this is because neither these people, nor anyone else for that matter, yet understands what the results and implications of these phenomena entail; as these become clearer, things will change, and I bet that the number of folks against these practices will decrease and over time may well even become a minority. Now, our experiment. A c…
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…ience, and then you add to that DNA, which has been called things like the code of codes, the holy grail. We give it this kind of supernatural significance. So, I think it’s a combination of being a society that values data, being a society that equates progress with scientific development, and being a society that thinks that genetics—in part because DNA comes from you, from us, from we—is the ultimate information, the ultimate data. It’s like th…
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…re—it deserves the scare quotes that the Chicago Manual of Style says are “used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard (or slang), ironic, or other special use.” At the very least, the clearly coordinated and targeted effort to rebrand the freedom to discriminate as “religious freedom” meets the Oxford English Dictionary’s criteria for the use of scare quotes (emphasis mine): Quotation marks used around a word or phrase when they ar…
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