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Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Jihadis?

By Haroon Moghul

…ts, about better foreign policy choices, this is not your book. In the late 18th century, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab launched a theological revolt against Sunni and Shia orthodoxies. He won the backing of the nascent Saudi state, and thereafter went to war with the closest thing Sunni Islam had to a Papacy, the (Ottoman) Caliphate. Wahhabism took aim at the religious hierarchies that had built up over centuries, while offering nothing with much s…

Cuba Opens its Doors to the Catholic Church

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…The significance of Wenski, Castro, and Ortega together at the Seminary of San Carlos and San Ambrosio, a symbolic trinity of Cubans’ and Cuban-Americans’ negotiations between identity, land, and religion, is not lost on me. For the Catholic Church globally, this opening is a public testimony of the survival of Catholicism in spite of increasing clergy shortages throughout other parts of Latin America. While many are heralding this as the beginnin…

The Heart of Texas Ain’t Hateful: An Open Letter to Lawmakers From a Texan Trans Queer Latinx

By Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

…ool athletics, suggesting the medically necessary treatment that some trans youth undergo is actually “steroid use” intended to give students an unfair competitive advantage. The bill, which was drafted in response to 17-year-old trans student Mack Beggs’ victory in a girl’s wrestling tournament (because the young man, by virtue of being trans, is barred from competing with his male peers), passed the Senate on Wednesday….

Act, Pray, Tweet: What the H*ll To Do About Gun Violence?

By Marcia Pally

…thing of divine capacity. Thus, we can act without God’s perpetual, instant-by-instant miraculous intervention. He and others also noted that Malebranche’s theology, voiding human action, rather uncomfortably set God as the cause of evil. One need not be a Leibnizian to follow the Abrahamic premise—in Augustine, Maimonides, and Aquinas, for instance—that we are created in the image of divine intelligence and so have something of that intelligence…

Hagee Hangs On

By Bill Berkowitz

…ionship: The Christian right’s view of Israel derives largely from a double-edged theological position. Following a classic anti-Jewish stance, it regards the Jewish people as spiritually blind for rejecting Jesus. Yet it says that divine promises to Jews (to bless those who bless them, to return them to their land) remain intact. Indeed, it regards Israel’s existence as proof that biblical prophecies are coming true; heralding an apocalypse in wh…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…ing Commission in March. Newman’s plan instead centers on the same death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy of obstructionism and nuisance complaints that they’d waged against Tiller’s clinic for years before the murder. They had already begun this winter, with public challenges about whether Burkhart had the correct permits for her renovation—“these stupid regulations” Newman derided, but which he nonetheless used as a weapon—and forthcoming probes abou…

Sarah Palin and the Politics of Victimization

By Randall Balmer

…rity than that of victim. The book fairly bristles with resentment and self-pity about “the politically-motivated attacks that began the day I was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate in 2008.” Perhaps that, in the end, accounts for her popularity. We live in an age where victimization carries undeniable cachet. If you can somehow make the case that you’ve been treated unfairly or that your tribe (Republicans, “patriotic America…

Dylann Roof Was Wrong: The Race War Isn’t Coming, It’s Here

By Willie James Jennings

…an) citizen stepped on the shores of Africa and the Americas and other soon-to-be-colonized places and said, “God has given this land and these people to me. This is mine.” The belief in God-given possession flows like a vampire virus through the veins of this country. We eagerly draw lifeblood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your…

In a Time of Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly ‘Dance Plague’ at 500

By Ed Simon

…spiracy; when “pizzagate” inspired a gunman to raid a pizzeria; where “flat-Earthers” have a growing fan-base; or where people ingest Tide Pods; can we really argue that these aren’t as foolish a bit of mass hysteria as dancing oneself to death? Scottish journalist Charles Mackay contends in his 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, that during times of social disarray we “find that whole communities … become sim…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…be the European front in the new Cold War, and a three-year civil war, from 1946-1949, further decimated the country. The country opted for tourism in the 1960s, arguably the least “trickle-down” of all economic forms, and thus made itself further dependent upon and vulnerable to European whims. The U.S.-supported military junta was not expelled until 1974. And so on.) How to Sue a Monastery Into that atmosphere—one part boom town, and one part W…