Religion Dispatches
…als. The president approaches Indonesia as an equal in his speech. Unlike Cairo, where the (Arab) Muslim world was treated as unequal potential partners, the Indonesians are treated as a country worthy of America’s respect. Cairo was aspiration, and Jakarta was the real. There are huge differences in political processes in play. Indonesia is a democracy with strong civic institutions and a thriving civil society. The Arab world is dominated by aut…
Read More…rganic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonly worn by people in the northwest of the Subcontinent. Thin, baggy trousers and a long, billowy shirt. It’s also 52°. Nobody notices. Not obviously, and not surreptitiously. Nobody looks up, raises eyes in surprise, or grins…
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…of Satan’s minions. It all started with MSG. While I was living abroad in China, I found that many expatriates insisted they were highly sensitive to MSG, yet multiple double-blind, placebo-controlled trials had led allergists to conclude MSG sensitivity is largely psychosomatic. In itself, this wasn’t surprising: the mind is well-known for having powerful positive (placebo) and negative (nocebo) effects on health. What surprised me was the dogma…
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…video, you can hear rapid-fire gunshots followed by mothers wailing in despair, pleading with armed police to save their kids. The good guys with the guns were not that good. Indeed, they were deadly. It was the teachers, who were not armed, who did the most to save their students. The real heroes are dead. The cowards are alive. But the living get to write history. White power incarnate As a matter of fact, police departments across the country d…
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…g mall, not even about the current Prime Minister and resident bull in the china shop, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but about stories. Who Turks think they are, how far back they trace their history, what they make of Ottomans and Ataturks, and what that means for their future. Ataturk marshaled the last Ottoman armies to hold off Greek and Italian invasions, but it’s what he did next that created modern Turkey, and the crisis of identity that is at the…
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…h a memorial to death, and a celebration of possibility in traditions from China to Egypt to Ethiopia. Bread is ritually important in a Judeo-Christian context, but not in Asian religious traditions; and its non-universality, writes Plate, makes bread like religion: “It has some basic ingredients…and serves certain purposes…but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the similarities between traditions can be difficult to sniff out.” Telling t…
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…rights around the world. Unfortunately, Trump’s cabinet choices include a number of stridently anti-gay figures, and his rumored pick of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State is sounding alarm for Tillerson’s close ties to Russia’s Vladimir Putin as well as the company’s historically poor track record on LGBT issues. C-Fam, the US based organization that is helping to lead an anti-LGBT backlash at the United Nations, attacked a spee…
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…result in tragedy. This was the case in Stalinist Soviet Union and Maoist China, but the same was true of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, Puritan Massachusetts, Catholic Spain, or Christian Rome. In reality, despite all the tragedies that occurred in the Soviet Union, it was a deeply moralistic society where each individual was expected to contribute to the common good and endure sacrifices for the benefit of future generations. The arts, the med…
Read More…ceived lack of orthodoxy. That means that any Mormon who goes through the fairly common experience of being raised a literal believer and orthodox practitioner but transitions to a less orthodox worldview as an adult (or coming out as gay) may find themselves rejected by their family and their social community of origin and cut off from the major institutional sources of their primary identity. Faced with such rejection, some unorthodox Mormons ha…
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…a period of at least six years. Some of these victims were children “originaires d’Asie ou des pays de l’Est” (originating in Asia or Eastern countries). Which is to say that they’re marked as non-white Asian children. We don’t know the proportion of Asian victims to non-Asians, but no other ethnic or national marker is mentioned. We can conclude, therefore, that he contributed to the production of child pornography and the rape of Asian children….
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