Religion Dispatches
…eral new Islamic schools for girls and women. • Many Muslim women in South Asia have pushed their way into male-dominated areas, working to create a women-only mosque in Tamil Nadu, conducting marriages, and forming jamats (communities of traditionally-male elders that arbitrate on family matters). The 1970s brought about what is referred to as an “Islamic revival” in many predominately Muslim countries. The increased involvement of women in publi…
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…ga river valley, Crimea and southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus and Central Asia, whose peoples have never fully come to terms with being subjugated. (The lack of real democracy, of course, is a major reason their alienation continues.) But the Russia that once bested Napoleon and Hitler, that rivaled the United States for global power, has had less luck of late. If it’s not hard to imagine Russia losing in Syria, it’s because we saw Russia lose ba…
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…the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Spain and Portugal and in Southeast Asia. At the time, Metropolitan Hilarion explicitly stated that with the creation of the new church bodies, the Russian Orthodox Church would “act as if they [i.e. the Patriarchate of Constantinople] do not exist at all,” a sort of declaration of war against the Ecumenical Patriarch and a clear indication of the Russian Orthodox Church’s intention to lead the Orthodox world…
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…trast, what Israel might look like if it had been established somewhere in Asia). The Jews became Western, but the area in which they chose to establish their state went the other way. The asymmetry between Israeli power and Palestinian powerlessness, quite apart from the moral calculus (which certainly does not lie only on one side), replicates and thus comes to symbolize the asymmetry of the West and the Islamic world. It is this strange histori…
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…ans. As well, the significance of American military veterans showing up in numbers offers another marker of the very important conscientization now going on among the veterans of America’s more recent imperial adventures. 7. Prayerful Democrats. It can’t be bad to see sober reflection among the leading national Democrats about having lost their way. Finally there’s some recognition that they can’t cater to the whims and wishes of the 1 percent and…
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…o basin, the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, the tropical forests of the Asia Pacific region, and the Guarani Aquifer, among others.” This approach shows how a global organization can be useful. The Amazon, the so-called “lungs of the universe,” is seen to be on life support given the ways in which the land has been exploited by developers and the people have been robbed of their culture: “The Amazon Basin encompasses one of our planet’s largest…
Read More…. 11th article Spinning Ft. Hood generated some very strong feelings and a number of comments that violated our commenting policy. As a result we closed comments and invited readers to send a letter to the editor (a format we’ll be moving to on all stories when we relaunch early next year. Blogs will continue to feature comments). The following is one such letter: Burk Braun writes: “Criminal acts involving murder are forbidden explicitly [in Isla…
Read More…d “Tea and Talk”, an Arabic-language meeting for LGBT people on Istanbul’s Asian side. In a room furnished only with fold-out chairs, and walls decorated by photographs, newspaper clippings and banners from the LGBT rights struggle in Turkey, tea is poured and conversation begins, as a small rainbow flag flutters from the window. The first meeting welcomed nine intrigued but slightly nervous guests, and has grown ever since. Participants from acro…
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…of Muslims—two women in hijab, two men, and some teen boys from Southeast Asia—as they passed out literature depicting Islam as a gentle religion and listened to the Qur’an over a portable radio. The two groups shared a common enemy but couldn’t seem to forge a useful alliance. Such is the awkward bedfellows that Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, loves to make. When Terry Jones, pastor of Dove World Christian Outreach in Gainesville, Flo…
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…rly church fathers were disdainful of those – especially the Montanists in Asia Minor – who claimed they could have spiritual inspiration through experience alone, and in so doing, supplement scripture. If we look at the earliest years of the Christian tradition, we can find both Jewish and Christian extra-canonical accountings of trips to heaven – and yet most of these traditions didn’t make it into received canon. In the early centuries of Chris…
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