Religion Dispatches
…see the exclusivism embedded in their own efforts at pluralism. We have a Turkish Cultural Center that plays an important role in Jacksonville and I have enjoyed many of their events. They hold an annual “Unity Dinner” that they had repeatedly asked me to attend. A couple of years ago I went and learned, through a film that was the culmination of the evening, what they meant by unity: we really all believe in one God. Rather than seeking to elimi…
Read More…e to fully integrate almost a million Dutch Muslims, mostly of Moroccan or Turkish descent. In existence only since 2006, the Freedom Party, tightly controlled by Wilders, has grown to be the Netherlands second largest, and fastest growing, party. Recent polls suggest it could even replace Balkenende,s Christian Democrats as the top party in 2011 parliamentary elections. Wilders is no friend of the U.S.: he opposes Dutch military involvement in Af…
Read More…ys of comics, the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s brought with it a modest number of female characters, including the first Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers. First appearing in 1968, and debuting on her own in 1977, Ms. Marvel was meant to be, in the words of writer Chris Claremont, a “hip, happening, 70s woman striking out on her own,” from the honorific “Ms.” to her job as the editor of Woman magazine. There was not a lot of religion in comics until th…
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…im, it is a democracy and it is part of Western security architecture. The Turkish Navy is now off the coast of Libya; I’m sure perceptive Libyans notes the awkward anniversary: 100 years ago, in 1911, the Ottoman Empire lost its last African territory, Libya, to Italy. And speaking of Italy—the mother country of our favorite ethnic white reality show cast—this brings us to the most profound, insistent and unexpected influence on the Arab revoluti…
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…longer seen as risqué. In this younger generation were also an increasing number of Muslim students (from Muslim family backgrounds and also from convert backgrounds) who brought Islamic Studies into closer dialogue with Religious Studies and began to question the divide between “studying religion” and “living religion.” That said, it was really non-Muslim scholars who broke open the field. I remember the thrill of buying the book Islamic Homos…
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…of his life, for instance, on Creation and the Second Coming, and even the Turkish creationist Harun Yahya promised me when I met him that Jesus would return in ten years and evolutionism would be done with—well, that’s seven years, now. So what has Eden to do with the end? What note will you tuck in it when you mail a review copy to Harold Camping? Is that seven years exactly? I’ll have to mark my calendar. I wouldn’t bother. So, yes, Eden is als…
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…ading evolutionary biologists took center stage; a representative from the Turkish creationist movement led by Harun Yahya was forcibly removed from the microphone. With his eye on the secularism that has engulfed Europe, Pope Benedict hopes that the roads of science can lead back to Rome. The Vatican might agree with Dan Brown in this respect more than it would like to admit. By allying with Templeton, the Church has begun (or, rather, continued)…
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…urt of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.” The major disappointment in the comment, in my view, is its failure to address hate speech laws, which in many countries function as de facto restrictions on blasphemy and sacrilege. Theoretically, we can distinguish between bashing a bel…
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…the average viewer would have no frame of reference for it. Serbs refer to Turkish treachery in the past, for example, yet it’s not clear if anyone would know that Bosnian Muslims are not Turks—that they are ethnically and linguistically the same as Serbs. The two are, in fact, differentiated by religious affiliation, which has become not a matter of choice or conviction, but of identity, and thus political destiny. Worse, though, is that we never…
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…te, which ruled the Sunni Muslim world for centuries and which the current Turkish government claims to emulate, was much more open-minded on this issue. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire had an extensive literature of homosexual romance, and an accepted social category of transvestites. The Ottoman sultans, arguably, were social liberals compared with the contemporary Islamists of Turkey, let alone the Arab World. Despite such arguments, the majority of…
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