Religion Dispatches
…part from Islam, they still have plenty of issues. After ethnicity, “it’s too arbitrary to exclude religion entirely from the equation.” Without Islam, “most of the Middle East would have remained predominantly Christian, in its various sects, as it had been at the dawn of Islam.” A few Zoroastrians and Jews were the only representatives of other religions. Would harmony with the West have reigned if Christianity had kept a near-monopoly? Hardly….
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As we begin to gain some distance from the tragedy at Ft. Hood and take a tour of media and blog responses, three things become apparent. First, our military is clearly ignoring its mental health needs; second, many groundlessly assume that religion must have played a role in the massacre; and third, ill-conceived rhetoric can infect our military culture, with potentially disturbing results. Mental Health Breakdown As others have noted, on-base a…
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…est. As a burly young black man with a loud voice and strange hair, Ward stood out when he addressed the predominantly white audiences of folks concerned about rising prejudice and bigotry. After April 19, 1995, people began to take Ward more seriously, as bodies were removed from the Oklahoma City Federal Building, collapsed by a truck bomb delivered by a domestic terrorist seeking to shift the right-wing populists into an armed insurrection. Tim…
Read More…ct, and then offer a brief introduction to the argument of my forthcoming book. Over the past several years I have co-organized the Politics of Religious Freedom project, a collaborative research effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. These efforts are now bearing fruit, and in 2015 our project team will publish a volume, Politic…
Read More…ted to keep their Islam in the closet. Then the events of September 11th shook the proverbial skeletons out of that closet. And lo and behold, now they are Muslims and they are the primary spokepersons about this new popular trend of Islam in America. Some even made a considerable amount of money off of their version of the “I am your friendly neighborhood Muslim; and I am an American;” as if Muslims didn’t exist in America before they became spok…
Read More…them to DC for the occasion. The younger ones—including middle and high school students—are given days off by their Catholic schools to enjoy a school sponsored (and in some cases paid for) trip to the Nation’s Capital. The older ones are college students who make a road trip of it, knowing that a night on a church floor and a day that begins with mass at the Verizon Center is a good way to meet (do they hook up, one wonders) other young people wi…
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…sode of Progressive Religious Voices (listen to the first two here), Dr. Eboo Patel talks about how his Muslim faith grounds his deep commitment to pluralism and his work with youth around the world at Interfaith Youth Core. Eboo compellingly describes what he calls the significance of the emerging “Faith Line.” The Faith Line, as Eboo describes it, does not separate people of different religions but separates religious pluralists on the one hand…
Read More…rd that her mother and older brother were found shot dead inside her childhood home. This was coupled with the news that her seven-year-old nephew was missing. Unfortunately, any hopes of a silver-lining to this tragedy were extinguished on Monday when the body of the boy was discovered inside of her slain brother’s stolen SUV. There are reports that numerous neighbors and well-wishers have flocked to the Hudson’s South Side Chicago residence to p…
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Buffalo Bill’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is how do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death —e. e. cummings When I saw the Confederate flags and angry signs and heard the rhetoric of frustration coming from Dick Armey’s protest rally at the Capitol grounds on Saturday, I thought: So n…
Read More…service,” David P. Gushee wrote: I knew from the beginning that if Obama took typical Democratic positions on abortion-related issues, this centrist evangelical friendliness toward him and his administration would be tested. I knew that during the campaign he had hewed closely to the standard Democratic pro-choice line. But his party’s platform also promised a commitment to abortion-reduction efforts, and he has echoed that language. Some of us c…
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