Religion Dispatches
…off last year after my accident.) You know what they say about saving the best for last?! So it is appropriate, I think, that in my reading I came across several discussions about the ummah, which gave me additional food for thought. The word ummah comes from the same root as the word for mother, umm, in Arabic. So, with such a root, you should get the picture already. It’s about intimate connections. But it is never used for family nor even for…
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…ns/Simon & Schuster), Freddoso’s book joined Corsi’s on the New York Times best-seller list. As a Political Research Associates’ Right Web profile of Regnery points out, the company, founded by Henry Regnery in 1947 in Chicago, and [i]nitially affiliated with the University of Chicago’s “Great Books” series, … became a leading publisher of old-guard, conservative writers such as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr.“ After being…
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…it, but I do expect its authors to make strong arguments, informed by the best thinking of Western religious traditions. First Things is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life “to confront the ideology of secularism, which insists that…faith has no place in shaping the public conversation or in shaping public policy.” So I was astonished by Mark Regnerus’s laughable piece, “The Death of Eros,” which makes an entirely secular (and…
Read More…dimir Putin trying to build a new Orthodox empire?” In many ways, it’s the best of times for the Russian Orthodox Church. The vast majority of Russians now identify as Orthodox—a stark change from the immediate post-Soviet period. Recent years have seen a flurry of church construction throughout the country. And perhaps most important of all, there’s a committed believer—Vladimir Putin—in the Kremlin, a man who surrounds himself with other influen…
Read More…ies are so diametrically opposed that rational debate becomes difficult at best. Unbending, frequently dogmatic rhetoric (on both sides!) functions to cut off genuine dialogue at the knees. Thus it’s all the more intriguing when, on rare occasions, real contact and communication occurs. Robert Tapp recently posted an intelligent response to my column on RD. Three of his claims are particularly provocative and deserve attention. The paraphrases are…
Read More…n the world, cannot resort to debating which interpretation of the text is best, as though the texts exist independent of the people who read them. So Islam can be violent, and so can Christianity. Thankfully other Muslims and Christians want to say that those folks are not “really Muslim,” or “really Christian.” But if all we have is that which scholars call “insider discourse,” then conversations across religious divides become, at worst, dising…
Read More…men’s exclusive access at designated times. I have a plan, and Allah knows best. I will do whatever the rest of the day might dictate to get as much access within the limited times as I can. I like my shaykh’s advice to seek as much of the nur or light of Muhammad (saw) as I can. My shaykh, and many Sufi teachers talk about Nur-Muhammad. Some go as far as to say the whole universe was created only after Nur-Muhammad. Or that the whole of the unive…
Read MoreThere’s an old adage in politics that the best way to kill a political career is to be found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. It may be time to add an addendum to the adage: be nice to a Muslim. ”Not since the election of John Kennedy (a Catholic) in 1960 has the religious faith of a US presidential candidate generated so much distortion as the false claims generated by extremist critics that Senator Barack Obama, the candidate of the Democ…
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…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…
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…and established emissary posts there). Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and u…
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