Religion Dispatches
…he “Islamization of Europe” is a matter of life and death for European and Western civilization—especially those who argue that the culprits for this development are those who gave up Europe’s Christian character. The blogger Fjordman, for example (whom Breivik admiringly and extensively quotes) writes in a 2007 post for The Brussels Journal, “In more and more cities across the continent, non-Muslims are being harassed, robbed, mugged, raped, stab…
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…the tradition (a concept favored by Dreher) of reflection on such ideas in Western civilization (another favored concept). Rhetoric matters. Or more precisely, concepts and language matter. “The medium is the message,” to quote Dreher quoting Marshall McLuhan. If living in the truth is as important to Dreher as he claims, perhaps getting our own history matters. My argument, however, doesn’t hinge on the importance of a single line. It’s merely in…
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…, and we took it here and said: We’re going to make Christians. We brought western theology, not Christianity.” As Mendies sees it,the priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christian ethics are applied to societal issues such as poverty, violence, preventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues,…
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…ring and agonized enough to produce a metastasizing strain of violent anti-Western jihadist beliefs to which Mateen — like the San Bernardino shooters — was apparently susceptible. This paragraph rapidly descends into one of the most nonsensical analyses of the modern Muslim world. It’s not just silly, reductionist, and wrong, but embarrassingly evasive, the mirror image of Muslims who, confronted with radicals who kill in the name of Islam, insis…
Read More…eece, bring several personal memories to mind. The first took place on the western coasts of Crete, at an archaeological excavation with which I’d been involved for several years. The local head of the thirty-or-so workers we had employed, a lovely man who has since gone to his reward, was gazing out at the sea during a midday break, smoking a cigarette, quietly staring. When I asked him what he was thinking about, he responded immediately and wit…
Read More…gion and Democracy is crying foul and accusing the Bishop of trying to get Western countries to use their influence in Africa to help accomplish the “acceptance of homosexuality in Africa.” The IRD, bankrolled by conservative funders like the reclusive Howard Ahmanson, has, since the early 1980s, made it its mission to cause splits and dissension in Protestant denominations. According to Jim Naughton of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who con…
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…sm of the tendencies of separation, analysis, self-centredness inherent in Western thought… Yet [these cultures] were never examined with the respect they deserved…they were ridiculed and replaced as a matter of course first by the religion of brotherly love and then by the religion of science… Shapiro sees his book as opposed to Christianity. But for Feyerabend, the evangelical Christian and the evangelical skeptic are united in a quintessentiall…
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…tern influence is fundamentally changing African societies for the worse. “Western society is trying to destroy us,” he says. “Behaviours such as fornication, spirit of independence, gay rights, no respect for elders, abortion and birth control are being imported. African leaders must maintain our culture.” He says the archbishop of the local Episcopal church is currently directing his ministries to investigate if they receive any funds from forei…
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…is fair, and 2) What it says about the mainstream media’s approach to non-Western spirituality. Let’s dispatch with the first as quickly as possible. Fourteen paragraphs are devoted to Glenn Black, a yoga teacher and physical therapist who explains How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body, while zero paragraphs (not one!) are devoted to an opposing voice; someone, anyone from the yoga or medical communities who has a different point of view. Shockingly for a…
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…uzuki, and Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, have labored to raise Western awareness of their cultures and traditions. In doing so, they presented specific aspects of their Buddhist traditions while leaving out others. These Buddhist monks were not alone in this portrayal of Buddhism. As Donald S. Lopez Jr. and others have poignantly shown, academics quickly followed suit, so that by the 1960s U.S popular culture no longer depicted Buddhis…
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