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New Study: Islamophobia Common in Catholic Media

By Jordan Denari Duffner

…essive stance against radical Islam.” There is a “long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam,” he said in the 2014 appearance, calling Catholics to “form an aspect of the church militant” in response to “barbarity.” Though Bannon’s comments were welcomed by the Rome-based group, his views aren’t tolerated by many in the Pope Francis wing of the Catholic Church. The pope — who recently returned from a trip to Egypt to meet with…

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

By Alana Massey

…ere.” The cognitive dissonance required to listen to an album in which play-by-plays of the Transfiguration of Jesus and the Binding of Isaac are thoroughly detailed and not declare it either pedantic or preachy is a deep dissonance indeed. Sufjan Stevens plays like, seven hundred instruments. He composes for ballets. The dude likes his details. Why couldn’t critics just let Sufjan Stevens bear prophetic witness? Perhaps it’s that the aftertaste o…

‘Russkii Mir,’ the Russian Equivalent of ‘Blood & Soil’ Ideology at the Heart of Putin’s War, Explained and Rejected by Theologians in New Statement

By Daniel Schultz

…subscribing to a worldview that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.” It should not go without notice that Russians are hardly the only ones to indulge in “mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.” Religion Dispatches, among other outlets, is chock-full of the weird, apocalyptic visions of prosperity gospel preachers, the dispiriting conspiracy theories used by the far right to un…

Romania’s “Witch Tax”: Magic Meets Bureaucracy

By Joseph Laycock

…whistle. About four in five Romanians are Orthodox Christians. Unlike self-described witches in the United States and Western Europe, Romanian witches do not see their practice as a religious tradition distinct from Christianity. Instead their rituals appear to be syncretic, combining Christian and pre-Christian symbols. The sign of the cross is ubiquitous in witch rituals and some blessings require candles purchased from a church. However, the s…

Devil’s Bookmark: Doubting God’s Existence, but Angry Nevertheless

By Bernard Schweizer

…is so, then one would assume that there is a connection between the author-as-teacher and the story-as-lesson. In writing one of the greatest stories of misotheism in recent memory (i.e. His Dark Materials), Philip Pullman is teaching his readers that they should look to liberal, secular values to give meaning to their lives and that they should despise deities as the dispensers of morality. By identifying him as a misotheist, all I’m doing is ho…

Pat Buchanan Praises Breivik’s Cultural Analysis

By Sarah Posner

…entic and historic crisis. . . . As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right. Buchanan harkens to a Thomas Jefferson quote, “Like a fire bell in the night,” as he awakened to the possibility of the slavery issue provoking a civil war. Buchanan joins the American Family Association’…

Nonviolence, Muslim Style: From Ghaffar Khan to Tahrir Square

By Eric Stoner

…o and his honor and stature was such that they couldn’t resist. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, women used to lead their marches! This is just incredible. What power and influence he must have had to convince them to allow that to happen! Did that lead to a large scale change in the way that women were perceived in Pashtun society? No, probably not. Did that perhaps lead to a small, tiny change? Hopefully yes. If we leap forward to what’s happening…

Museum of (In)tolerance for Divided City

By Shalom Goldman

…e hostility to Islam, “the imposter religion,” as it was known in some late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant circles. A century and a half ago Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, spent a few weeks in Jerusalem. He was despondent before the visit, and even more so afterwards. Jerusalem, for Melville, represented the past, not the future. In his journal he noted that “Jerusalem is besieged by an army of the dead.” He penned that observation…

As Mormon Lay Clergy Are Deported, a Divide on Immigration

By Joanna Brooks

…he image of what it means to be Mormon cherished by many conservative Anglo-American multi-generational Mormons. And the Church is doing its best, if haltingly, and with qualifiers—including the phrase in its recent statement suggesting that guest worker status need not “necessarily” lead to citizenship—to negotiate deeply seated nationalist allegiances among its members. It’s the history of Mormonism and its aspirations to modern peoplehood that…

Nevada Rejects Nihilism, California Rejects Euphoria, and Volatility Reigns

By Joanna Brooks

…the state’s 26% Latino population which went 90% Reid. Surely Angle’s anti-Latino, anti-immigrant television ads helped get Latinos to the polls. *The lone congressional Democrat in Idaho has fallen, but don’t credit the Tea Party quite yet. Freshman Blue Dog Democrat Walter Minnick lost Idaho’s 1st Congressional District 51-49% to Raul Labrador, who is Mormon and a graduate of Brigham Young University. But even though news sources are now toutin…