Religion Dispatches
…g mall, not even about the current Prime Minister and resident bull in the china shop, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but about stories. Who Turks think they are, how far back they trace their history, what they make of Ottomans and Ataturks, and what that means for their future. Ataturk marshaled the last Ottoman armies to hold off Greek and Italian invasions, but it’s what he did next that created modern Turkey, and the crisis of identity that is at the…
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…ding, writing, and civics. And I am horrified by the the sharp drop in the number of undergraduates majoring in humanities and the brutal paring of humanities faculties even at liberal arts schools. But God help us if we think the only way to save humanities education is to corrupt it utterly by stressing the cash value—or the national security value—of brushing up our Shakespeare. It is obvious to all that one big reason fewer undergrads take hum…
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…applied to different cultures around the world. The essays on religion in China, Japan, Islamic societies, and the United States published in 1970 in his book of essays, Beyond Belief, illustrates that point. In his 1967 essay in Daedalus on “Civil Religion,” Bellah founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones. In this case it…
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…pment of US policy toward Sudan, which IRFA-associated groups named as the Number One violator of religious freedom for five years in a row, as US policy evolved to support the country’s division into Sudan and South Sudan in 2010. But the law plays virtually no role in US policy toward Saudi Arabia, given that, for 15 years, the president has waived sanctions on the basis of US national security interests.) More recently, people generally mean th…
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…don’t. All you have to do is think about those Communists in Russia and in China who did such unbelievably terrible things for years. How can that be except that they somehow fervently believed something that was preposterous? I think there are sociopaths, but I think there are also people who overcome their sense of compassion and scruples because they have this profound conviction that they are right and everybody else is wrong. I think extremis…
Read More…ia, in which the U.N. is blocked from acting decisively because Russia and China will use their vetoes against any action that imperils Assad, President Obama should call a conclave of the world’s other countries, all of them, and let them together decide on what should be done with regard to saving the people of Syria from its rogue regime. The specific use of chemical weapons should be referred to the World Court for possible trial of whoever is…
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…met, and eventually married, Ruth McCue Bell, daughter of missionaries to China, who had initially resisted the advances of the young preacher because he did not aspire to be a missionary. By the time he graduated from Wheaton College in 1943, Graham had developed the simple, earnest preaching style for which he would become famous. Early Career as an Evangelist Graham briefly became pastor of small congregation in Western Springs, Illinois, and,…
Read More…n felt compelled to share many of the insights I’ve gained with friends in China. When I began to read Religion Dispatches it occurred to me that the best way to do this would be to introduce RD’s in-depth articles to Chinese readers by translating a few, with the hope that more people will be encouraged and enlightened by them. Perhaps it will spark a desire, among those in both the East and the West, to share stories and engage in meaningful dia…
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…omen who admire me?” I told him, “I always give them five or six names and numbers, and the press says, ‘we’ve gone to them, and they won’t talk.’” I said to reporters, “I can only tell you my experience, and my experience is that he’s not accepting of people who are different, particularly women who are single who he has to deal with one-on-one.” Lots of women told me, “Don’t give the press my name anymore,” some because they had negative things…
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…redictably stirred a flurry of comment over the holidays. Most recently, a number of prominent scholars and institutions have come out in opposition (though it should be noted that Hogwarts has thrown its fictitious weight behind the resolution). At the risk of piling on, there are significant reasons well beyond “academic freedom” (claimed by both sides in this debate) to oppose this action. To lay my cards on the table—I have attended the ASA n…
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