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Rope of God: The Aceh Tsunami—Four Years On

By Mark Woodward

…st for Aceh and Indonesia but for the world. A series of amateur videos by Western tourists in Malaysia and Thailand showed the tsunami striking beach resorts in all of its force. It did not distinguish between Asians and Westerners, or between Muslims and non-Muslims. It was an equal-opportunity killer. This evening was not just for Acehenese Muslims, but for people of all faiths and ethnicities. Theodicy seeks to explain why it is that a benevol…

Meditation is Very Relaxing, Says New York Times

By Jay Michaelson

…e, because my experience, as both a practitioner and a teacher, is that it promotes much more than relaxation. It opens the heart, it clarifies the mind; like the torso of Apollo in Rilke’s poem, it often demands, “you must change your life.” And if the thirst for “balance and harmony” (Atlas’ words) is the inspiration for practice—well, why not? If Atlas’ presentation of Buddhism seems trivial at times, that same smallness of scale makes it appro…

Imagine No Religion: Sustaining Morality Without God

By Konstantin Petrenko

…The one advantage of religiously-based morality—the fact that it claims to promote “absolute” or “objective” values—is also its greatest weakness. For one, religious ethics require belief in certain theological doctrines or sacred texts, limiting moral discourse to one religious tradition and excluding the majority of humanity. In an increasingly pluralistic and globalized society, religiously-based ethics cannot produce any sort of moral consensu…

Does Violence Always Win?: Learning From René Girard (1923-2015)

By Martha J. Reineke

…t.” In Sacrifice, one of his last books, Girard moves outside the orbit of Western religion to observe in the Hindu Vedas an eclipse of the sacrificial logic governing human culture that uncovers its mechanism in ways comparable though not identical to that disclosure in the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity. Students of mimetic theory have followed Girard’s own example in pursuing a critical engagement with his theory. In recent years, sch…

Manchester—Last Gasp of a Failing Terror Movement?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…lman Abedi would do such a thing. Was he motivated by a deep hatred of the Western culture that surrounded him as he grew up in Manchester? Was he brain-washed into a religious ideology that made him think that his act would bring him instant salvation? Or was his motivation more personal, simply a longing to prove himself, to make a mark on history? The motivations for Abedi are not yet clear. However, in my monitoring of online Twitter chats amo…

Fear, Nostalgia and Power Drove Evangelicals to Trump: Interview with Evangelical Scholar John Fea

By Eric C. Miller

…favor of the king. There is a long history of this kind of flattery in the Western tradition. When I see people like Falwell, Graham, Jeffress, Ralph Reed, Paula White, and any of these others who go to the White House to flatter Trump and never offer a word of criticism—whether it be about Stormy Daniels or building a wall or anything else—I’m reminded that they have sacrificed their moral vision in order to get whatever they can from him. That’s…

2017 Around the World: Progress and Persecution For LGBT People

By Peter Montgomery

…s as “lower than animals”, “savagery”, “subhuman”, “corrupt”, “diseased”, “western” and “Zionist”. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of a discourse that promotes and justifies hate and violence against LGBT people in the family, society, and in educational, judicial and law enforcement institutions. For example, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in one of his many remarks about homosexuality has said “If we were to presume that huma…

This Year’s Best Books in African American Religion

By Jonathan L. Walton

…ding to Carter the roots of modernity’s racial imagination can be found in Western Christianity’s racialization of the Jews as Semites which led in turn to both a severing of Christianity from its Jewish roots and an outright embrace of white supremacy or “the theological problem of whiteness.” It is this racialized pre-Enlightenment theological discourse that undergirds the racial theories of Immanuel Kant and other modern notions of race. Now I…

Will bin Laden’s Killing End the Jihadi Trend?

By Christopher Anzalone

…hanistan, the killing of civilians in drone and other US military strikes, Western support for Arab and Muslim autocratic regimes, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the “dishonoring” of Muslims around the world. It is true that the so-called “Arab Spring” has been a significant setback for al Qaeda and its affiliates, though much will depend on how the US and European governments respond. The continued violence and turmoil in Libya, Syria, Yeme…

UPDATE: An Abrupt End to Quebec Separatist Plan to Ban “Ostentatious Signs” of Religion

By Jeremy Stolow

…ebec’s lamentable endorsement of a broader Islamophobia that has swept the Western world in the post-9/11 context. The defeat of the government at the polls on 7 April would seem to indicate that the agenda of the Charter has now come to an end, and that Quebeckers have rejected its divisive politics. In the words of Bernard Drainville, the principal architect of Bill 60, on the day after the election, “It’s over, the Charter. We did what we cou…