Religion Dispatches
…s I’ve written in so many different areas. Hegel says that the owl of Minerva only takes flight at twilight. You can only begin to understand something as you look back. I didn’t set out to write about all this different stuff, I just followed wherever things took me. Looking back, it has much more coherence than I expected at the time. As I move from theology to philosophy, to literary criticism, to art, to architecture, to technology, to economi…
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…lgium with a 30% Walloon and a 60% Flemish population or pre-1993 Czechoslovakia (54% Czech and 31% Slovak). Israel’s very raison d’etre is to maintain its Jewish exclusivity. David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s first prime minister expressed this principle during a discussion in the Knesset on the 1950 Law of Return, which ensures automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew. “This law is the foundation of the State of Israel. It contains a central…
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…ding stricter border security, we forget that such measures have grossly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the US. Half of these used to return to Mexico annually, but researchers now estimate that only one-fourth do so today; stricter border enforcement measures since 1994 have staunched the cyclical flow of the return home of millions. The crisis of 12 million “illegal” immigrants is one of our own creation. The missing…
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…top thinking in that binary way and to start thinking expansively and extravagantly and realistically. Extravagant creative realists will own the future of this debate. Those who want to welcome immigrants will have to understand the legitimate concerns that many people have about the nation’s borders. But we all have to recognize that the welcoming people are not anti-law, nor are law-and-order people anti-welcome. Respecting the law does not aut…
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…Karmapa, one of which, Thaye Dorjee, backed by Shamarpa Lama, is highly influential and widely travels the world as his rival remains homebound by travel bans.) [Peter Lee of Asia Times has written a comprehensive article explaining the tangle of interests surrounding the rivalries that have led to the anointing of more than one Karmapa. -Eds.] If there is one positive outcome, it is that the controversy has raised the profile of Karmapa, albeit…
Read More…n that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemocratic and oppressive. As I wrote: This assumption lazily equates the public practice of Islam with all things undemocratic, whereas we are inclined to view secularism—even when enforced by a dictator—as explicitly preferable, even though in…
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…l love story) to a star that Ray thinks is an alluring but standoffish firefly, far out of his reach but not his love. Having grown up every summer of my youth visiting the “Evangeline Oak” in St. Martinsville, you best believe I spit out my goobers on that one. I suppose this was Disney’s way of being clever and trying to keep alive the memory of the legend, but it obscures what the real story has to offer. Places and things also get short shrift…
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…meat on the table. Country people shy at the thought of giving up their rifles because they feel unheard and neglected by distant power, she says. I believe her; I know her people too. But the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedo…
Read More…e?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
Read More…ntext of a Tea Party-infused, mortgage-meltdown-fueled voter backlash in Nevada. Nevada is about as volatile a place as you’ll find in the American West right now. It has the highest rate of mortgage foreclosures, mortgage fraud, unemployment, and bankruptcy in the nation. Over the last two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than do…
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