Religion Dispatches
…ow that Texas thing works, who those oil folks are and what they wanted in Iraq. I’m a born-again Christian too, but the longer I live, the more afraid I get of some of these religious groups that have so much influence on the Republicans and want to tell us how to live our lives. Haggard also took up for Obama in 2012: I don’t think it makes much difference who the president is. I think there was a big ball rolling before he came into the picture…
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…; the Gaza Strip remains under siege; the West Bank is even more occupied; Iraq teeters on the edge of anarchy; and Turkey has fallen under an authoritarian shadow. There are bright spots in the Muslim world, but a sense of ominousness is inescapable. It doesn’t just seem like the Arab Spring is over, but that the winter is here to stay. Should Trump and Putin translate their public flirtation into geopolicy, many more will die. Trump may very wel…
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…not appear to include exceptions for Muslims fleeing sectarian violence in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen. “The executive order violates the Establishment Clause by singling out Muslims for disfavored treatment and granting special preferences to non-Muslims,” the complaint alleges. It also discriminates “between ‘minority religions’ and majority religions, explicitly granting official preference to foreign adherents of minorit…
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…what UN Ambassador Nikki Haley had in mind when she pledge to ‘unabashedly promote American values.’” C-Fam has teamed up Russia and anti-equality African and Islamist nations to try to undermine the Council’s newly created independent expert, who is charged with investigating discrimination and violence on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. CNN reported this month on the ways that Donald Trump’s travel ban and suspension of refu…
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…er se. We sided with Muslims in Bosnia and Albania. And in Afghanistan and Iraq, we fought against some Muslims even as we empowered other Muslims. But while religion isn’t foremost in many of our analyses and forefront in our motivations, many Muslims do perceive these same conflicts as religious. Because religion is more prominent in their worldviews. That’s why some people in the Muslim world link the Prophet Muhammad cartoons to a larger, perc…
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…es for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.” The response to the proposal has been swift; spontaneous protests in support of immigrants and Muslims took place in airports across the nation, advocacy groups (successfully, so far) challenged portions of the order, while public figures like Madeleine Albright vowed to register as a Muslim. The immigration ban on refugees fro…
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…finitely. It would also temporarily block entry visas from seven countries—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya—for 30 days as part of a broader security review of visa-admission programs, after which permanent visa bans could be enacted for those countries and others.” Take this transparent attempt to privilege Judeo-Christian faith traditions in immigration policy and combine it with the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, whic…
Read More…an and gay people should be killed rather than jailed Malawi’s bishops are promoting misinformation when they claim first that homosexuality is “alien” to Malawians and second that foreign aid is being used to pressure donor nations to adopt LGBT rights. Misinformation is problematic, but doubly so when used to endorse, implicitly as well as explicitly, anti-LGBT prejudices that have and can lead to discrimination, imprisonment, and violence. Thou…
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…. While al-Qaeda and ISIS vie for control of fanatical forces in Syria and Iraq, across the world we can also see significant pushback within Islam against Wahhabism and Salafism and against all forms criminality committed under cover of piety. Reza Aslan speaks credibly of this as an Islamic Reformation moment. 4. Contested faith, second instance. Let’s not forget Pope Francis’s continuing emphasis on forgiveness & restoration. Yes, I know: these…
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…Versions of this argument have been made before. During the selling of the Iraq War and the broader “War on Terror,” for example, both neoconservatives and radical Islamists were invested in the widespread perception of an imminent existential threat to Western civilization. Both were invested in a Clash of Civilizations scenario, and both relied on the power of the apocaplyptic vision to build support for their causes. The anthropologist Kathleen…
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