Religion Dispatches
…ssume we can’t. From a security point of view, this proposal is dubious at best. Forcing out huge numbers of Muslim men would probably mean sending them back to, say, Syria, although, of course, many are not Syrian, they are from other parts of Europe, and come from countries which are applying to join the EU or planning to. So much, I suppose, for the trustworthiness and fellowship upon which a common European Union, so critical to American secur…
Read More…ect than Argentina, a country that is predominantly populated by people of European descent, has high levels of social and economic development, and possesses Latin America’s richest history of organized activism around the issue of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, in both Spain and Argentina the campaign for marriage equality shared the same slogan: “The same name with the same rights.” Additionally, he writes, secularization has played a role in…
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…d likely also St. Christopher. These stories were all translated into most European languages, and were ultimately bound together in Jacobus de Voragine’s late medieval bestselling novel, The Golden Legend. Thus several of the most popular saint’s biographies of Medieval Europe were translations of Buddhist Sanskrit! Why does this matter? The great popularity of Buddhist Jātaka narratives is not confined to any particular sect, because as models o…
Read More…anti-gay rhetoric, created an offensive “queer dictionary.” Sample definition: “Gay community: People busy killing each other then blaming heterosexuals.” Turkey: Roundtable on LGBTI planned by European Intergroup on LGBTI Rights The European Parliament’s Intergroup on LGBTI Rights will host a roundtable on LGBTI rights in Turkey on Tuesday in Brussels….
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…bs in the United States. So obviously, it creates an anxiety for a certain number of gays.” A Foreign Policy story reported that, in spite of a public relations offensive distancing itself from its anti-Semitic and fascist-sympathizing past, the National Front, “at its highest levels, is awash with Hitler admirers and Holocaust-denying far-right nationalists, including within Marine Le Pen’s inner circle, who could well be poised to work at the Él…
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…ivists to pressure multinational oil companies to use their leverage. Some European governments have been raising funds to evacuate gay men and expediting visa processing. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley released a statement saying the U.S. government is “disturbed” by the reports and calling on Chechen authorities to investigate: “We are against all forms of discrimination, including against people based on sexual orientation. W…
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…d Catholic and Muslim Palestinians. This view was typical for American and European missionaries as well. In the American Christian imagination, Ottoman “Christianity and Islam were coupled,” Ussama Makdisi argues, “as the two pillars of temporal and spiritual corruption that had to be struck down.” Twain’s comic depictions of a desolate, barren, and neglected Palestine later serve as documentary evidence in both Christian Zionist and Jewish Zioni…
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…sn’t modeled on ancient traditions. It is a descendant of the East-Central European nationalist ideas and movements from the last two centuries. Indeed, under these conditions, during World War II, the Hungarian regime, in a matter of months, delivered nearly 450,000 Jewish Hungarians to Auschwitz, more than half of the Hungarian Jewish population. When amoral Donald Trump unwittingly deployed his various uses of the term human dignity in his UN s…
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…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…
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…titutions take in large sums. The Grims are trying to turn a truism into a number. That’s always a delicate exercise. At best, figures can help us grapple with the experience of living in a mass society. But they can also produce a kind of false certainty that obscures more than it clarifies. So, does religious activity really account for 7% of the U.S. GDP? Perhaps. It depends on how you define religion. By any reasonable measure, the Grims’ $1.1…
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