Religion Dispatches
…salvation for those recruited into its ranks. In a recent essay in The New Republic, Graeme Wood described the core supporters of ISIS as an uneasy coalition of three groups: psychopaths, believers and pragmatists. The pragmatists are largely from Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq who have been disenfranchised by the Shi’a regimes of Bashir Assad in Damascus and Nouri al Maliki in Baghdad. On the other hand, the psychopaths and believers are often f…
Read More…ligent-design advocates all agree: Steven Pinker’s recent essay in the New Republic is trash. “Unbelievable hubris,” writes biologist PZ Meyers of the essay, titled “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians.” “Empirically overconfident” and “intellectually unsubtle” fumes Ross Douthat. “Steven Pinker may have just pissed you off,” notes NPR, unnecessarily. Pinker’s essa…
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…n, even more surprisingly in Chechnya, and cede tremendous autonomy to the Republic of Tatarstan for fear of losing control of that territory altogether. Today, though Russia barely hangs on to Chechnya and has an economy overly dependent on a single commodity (the price of which has been falling), its dictator has decided to annex Crimea, subsidize a frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine and, of course, double down on the regime of Bashar al-Assad….
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…enfranchised people trying to exist within an ever-expanding white settler republic. It isn’t always easy to know who to root for. Perhaps, like many African Americans, my attachment to Thanksgiving is simply residue of the relative respite that enslaved Africans gained during the holiday season from some of their labors, however minimal. According to the African-American Registry, “In October 1863, months after signing the Emancipation Proclamati…
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…d Jewish spectrum. To start things off, Jonathan Chait, writing in The New Republic, contends: I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn’t actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there’s little evidence that he’s a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. I suspect that Lieberman i…
Read More…are nothing less than attacks on those values that are the pillars of our republic and the guarantors of our freedom. They erode our national well being. Those who commit these crimes do so fully intending to tear at the too-often frayed threads of diversity that bind us together and make us strong. They seek to divide and conquer. They seek to tear us apart from within, pitting American against American, fomenting violence and civil discord. Eve…
Read More…ng dictators of a largely secular cast; Tunisia and Egypt were not Islamic Republics, Yemen was a mess to begin with but not particularly ideologically Islamic—although religiously conservative—and Syria was dominated by a secular Ba’ath party. Yet, as I wrote, the New York Times, America’s leading newspaper, irresponsibly confused religiosity with a lack of receptivity to democracy. (Then again, if you’re the majority, of course you’d support dem…
Read More…nti-LGBT social conservatives is being held in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, this week. The event is likely to have a pro-Putin and anti-European feel, given that many WCF groups have praised the anti-gay policies of Russia under Putin. The WCF website has featured a quote from local sponsor Levan Vasadze saying, “The West is attacking our Christian culture with atheism, new forms of socialism and sexual radicalism – worse than…
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…ans, who provide an elusive counterpoint to the early history of the Roman Republic. The nearest northern neighbors to Rome, Etruscans are associated with the mountainous interior of the storied western coast of Italy, up to what is still called Tuscany today. Some of the earliest Roman kings were Etruscan, and yet later, when Rome undertook her great campaigns that resulted in the peninsula, she singled out the Etruscans for special censure. Thre…
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…phraim was tonsured as a monk in 1947 on Mount Athos, an isolated monastic republic in the Aegean which forbids not only women, but even cows, from landing on its shores. He left Athos in 1979 when he went to Canada for medical treatment. From there, he came to the United States, which is (as with so many stories) where it gets weird. Traveling through the Greek-American communities of the early 1980s, Ephraim found what through other eyes might h…
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