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Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…ter 622, which is to say, per Hirsi Ali’s ‘Reformation,’ it never happened. 1.6 billion Muslims ditching Mecca in favor of Jerusalem would mean 1.6 billion Muslims who would then expect the right to arrive at the Temple Mount for worship, pilgrimage, study, and residence. Great idea! Far from Saudi Arabia holding a commanding position in the Muslim world, a new battle would open up between Fatah, Hamas, Iran, Turkey, and everyone else who claims t…

The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Friend of the Devil’ is a Love Song

By Pitman B. Potter

…life in jail.” The theme of alienation is expressed in the song’s focus on flight—from the law, from society, even from friends. And yet we are drawn to identification with an outlaw so alienated from the rest of the world, he believes the Devil is his only friend. In my ministry as an Anglican deacon, leading ministries that offer food, clothing and, most important of all, fellowship to homeless folks living on the streets of Vancouver’s West Sid…

Getting Back into Blogging

By Amina Wadud

…atable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kio…

The “Nones” Are Here… And Have Been for Over 100 Years

By Emily Mace

…m, the question of the day was similar to ones being asked today: Can this flight from the churches be stopped? Chubb feared that these wayfarers on the frontier would “become individualists and isolationists so far as religion is concerned, each ‘going it alone.’” Chubb’s words, so similar to Robert Putnam’s “bowling alone,” resonate clearly today, and they offer a warning to those who bemoan what such high numbers of “nones” means for the future…

Conservative Points in Pope’s Speech Include Liberal “Chasers”

By Patricia Miller

…enies that he has either a liberal or a conservative agenda. During his in-flight presser on Tuesday afternoon, he said it was a mistake to interpret him as “left-ish”: It is I who follows the church … my doctrine on all this … on economic imperialism, is that of the social doctrine of the church. While that may be true, the reality is that the social doctrine of the Catholic Church is a left-leaning doctrine that emphasizes communitarianism, disd…

My Kind of Atheist

By Peter Laarman

…ons to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion. One senses from this book that Schaeffer is at last free of the need to strap on his sword and buckle…

What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?

By Gordon Haber

…shootings in 2009: that of Nidal Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 servicemen and women and wounded 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, and George Sodini, who killed 3 women and wounded 12 at a Pennsylvania fitness club. Both men had no friends, work issues, difficulties meeting women, and felt victimized—Sodini by women and Hasan by his fellow soldiers for being a Muslim. And both men intended to die. Sodini shot himself before he could be stoppe…

Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…l formation along the way of describing his repeated trips to Brazil in the 1930s, his flight from France after the Nazis overran the country in 1940 (he fought in that failed French attempt to hold the Maginot Line against the German Blitz), and his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he…

What NOT to Expect from the Pope’s US Visit

By Anthea Butler

…xception. As is his custom, the Pope gave an interview to the press on the flight from Cuba to America. Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service reported that, in response to questions about being a communist and Newsweek‘s “Is the Pope Catholic?” headline, he responded: “I am certain I have never said anything more than what is in the social doctrine of the church. I follow the church and in this, I do not think I am wrong.” That is key to understan…

How Postwar Germany’s Witchcraft Trials Can Help Us Understand QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

By Monica Black

…cause in the intimacy of communities, in local settings, many people in the 1940s and 50s remembered how the Nazi new order had settled in when the dictatorship took hold in 1933—the way property, power, and position had been seized by the new masters and handed out among friends and allies. After 1945, the task often fell to denazification committees, formed of citizens with clean political records, to interview fellow community members and exami…