Religion Dispatches
…e PMS?” Although the torture captured on film at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was presented as aberrant (the behavior of “a few bad apples”), released memos have shown again and again that torture and so-called enhanced interrogation remain part of US policy—sanctioned, supported, ordered, and rewarded. And although President Obama opposes torture and pledged to close it, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp remains open and, as the ACLU reports, t…
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…levant, you would expect Broglio to invoke it in a critique of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which fell (and still fall) significantly short of Catholic just war criteria (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2309). With respect to DADT, Broglio’s reading is selective. While he emphasizes a few passages dealing with homosexuality, the Catechism offers no less than ten pages on the eighth commandment, regarding truthfulness. DADT should be repeal…
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…Still, there’s a good chance that aid to Israel, like the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will manage to be exempt from their ire. The billions of dollars spent every month on the two wars (and over 270 American military bases around the world) are somehow not a sign of “big government” for the Tea Party faithful. Late last month, in a trenchant article for The Nation, Princeton lecturer Melissa Harris-Perry sought to explain why many of he…
Read More…s left more than 48,000 people dead in Afghanistan and 1.6 million dead in Iraq. “I think the role of a leader is to understand there are differences on the issue of promoting a culture of life,” he says. “In other words, (we need to) convince people that we’re a more noble society if we honor life, without somebody castigating somebody based upon a differing opinion.” Then again, the only “life” that matters to Bush and Focus on the Family is tha…
Read More…next front in the religious right’s military culture war, in which it has promoted overt proselytizing by both chaplains and officers, and in the process, portrayed the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as epic confrontations between Christianity and Islam. Now, with its military evangelists in place, the religious right is taking one of its civilian crusades — to paint homosexuality as a religious war between the equal rights of sexual minorities…
Read More…ners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” 4. Ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So much for “blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9) or Jesus’ admonishment to “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). War can never fulfill our values of “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” 5. The ongoing persecution of gay, lesbian, bisexual,…
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…this?: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, and Bahrain. That’s 15 countries, including the most populous, Egypt. And while I’m not sure about The Sudan, there are of course strong restrictions around women’s dress in Saudi Arabia. That’s possibly 2 countries for the other side. (In fact, in the whole Muslim world, only two other countries legally mandate th…
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…is everywhere. It does matter. The ongoing sectarian violence in occupied Iraq had turned the headlines into daily reminders about the consequences of not taking religion seriously—to say nothing of politics in DC back then. Yes—sounds like a job for a religion scholar. Suddenly, committing the next however-many years to getting my degree in this stuff switched from the leap-of-faith category to eminently reasonable. Sure, maybe I’d end up a scho…
Read More…King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, would approve of the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Locals in Louisiana are arming themselves and coming up with a “security plan” to protect their churches, synagogues, and mosques. An event titled “The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks” will be held at the Conservative Political Action Conference next month. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf will no longer be the fund raising face or spokes…
Read More…es of Western support for their oppressors, by images from Afghanistan and Iraq, by constant betrayals, to mistrust the US and the West. These masses are now demanding and gaining the political space to express themselves. They will hardly speak kindly of US and Western policy of the past fifty years. Yet they have a choice before them. The choice is to either pursue their interests through rival realpolitik ideological positions or to pursue ju…
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