Religion Dispatches
…nd potential EU candidate that seemed to have successfully mixed Islam and freedom. Seemed. Turkey became bolder, challenging the United States over Iraq, from the war to the Kurdish region, and Israel over its blockade of Gaza. Even after Netanyahu apologized for the deaths of several Turkish citizens, Erdogan dragged his feet—though business ties between the two continue to grow. It’s often that way with Turkey. Crisis on top, but dynamism withi…
Read More…ights, it would not have armed Saddam Hussein after he gassed the Kurds in Iraq; it would not still be arming the Egyptian military after its coup and murder of thousands; it would not be arming Israel without demanding that Israel end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and create a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. The U.S., finally, would not have waited until one hundred thousand Syrians were killed to begin contemplating act…
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…ore than forty men thought to be homosexual. The murders were denounced by Iraqi human rights groups as well as by international LGBT activists. The Iraqi government did not condemn or even address the murders. All this may seem shocking, but, sadly, the criminalization and severe legal punishment of homosexuality are hardly unique to countries that follow Islamic law. In contemporary Uganda, legislators influenced by the most conservative version…
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…nciple of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians. But as I read it the resolution smacks of irony, at best, hypocrisy at worst. In my last book, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, I tried to point out how in American history a variety of agents have been prone to act on what I called “innocent domination.” That…
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…own social milieu to part with cloak and coin for the benefit of the dazed Iraq war vet with two pit bulls at the highway underpass down the road from church. It’s possible, then, to read the lingering significance of “Good Samaritan Jesus” for the religiously unaffiliated as a yearning for a more ethically engaged, prophetic Christianity. It does seem to be the case that some of the largest and most vibrant Christian congregations are those with…
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…came more and more involved in the Republican Party, supporting the war in Iraq. Very few Jesuits espouse nonviolence either. We run 28 universities, all of whom train young people to kill through ROTC. There was a lot of pressure in the Jesuit order to stop me, and they stopped me, and I eventually I left. It is all very sad and tragic, but in many ways what happened to me was inevitable. I am still called like any other follower of Jesus to prac…
Read More…ade young Muslims to participate in an end-times scenario now unfolding in Iraq and Syria. While the “apocalyptic cyclops baby” could be a calculated propaganda campaign it also demonstrate the inventive nature of fundamentalist religious movements. In her study of Jerry Falwell, cultural anthropologist Susan Harding pointed out that the seemingly rigid position of Biblical inerrancy paradoxically entails a great deal of creativity and imagination…
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…l Book Award winning collection Redeployment. “I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell lies.” Williams’s Icarus-like downfall after attempting to fly too close to the sun of war brought to mind a lie I heard not too long ago told in a pulpit of another kind. Two years ago, a guest preacher visited a church I sometimes attend, and delivered one of the best sermons I’d hear…
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…es Muslims today is a rowdy minority of gung-ho militants in the desert of Iraq and Syria. I think our problem is more subtle than that. We have convinced ourselves, and others, that we live on a planet apart as perfect Muslims who speak exclusively as agents and caretakers of their faith. The spectrum of our visibility is narrow: we are either the fanatic bad Muslim or the sanitized “good” Muslim. You see us only around incendiary topics and we c…
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…South as part of a campaign to commemorate 50 years since the Mississippi Freedom Summer? And from the 30 American Rabbis who went to march in Ferguson right after the high holidays this year? And from the activists working tirelessly in groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice? And particularly from those in the black community who are leading this struggle, in Ferguson, in Ohio, in New York, in Jackson? The first step: For those who hav…
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