Religion Dispatches
…tion to Allah. I also like the way he refers to our Prophet Muhammad. I think, the problem we used to have with being referred to as Mohammedans was only to clarify that we do not worship the Prophet. Because, in a way, what links us to other Muslims today is not just tawhid as much as it is that we follow the way of Muhammad. We are the ummah of Muhammad. According to the Qur’an, he will be a witness for us. And this makes me think, who is this P…
Read More…he bill is aimed at limiting the free distribution of Israel Hayom (Israel Today), the free newspaper owned by American casino magnate and Republican super-funder Sheldon Adelson. The same Sheldon Adelson who, at the inaugural meeting of the Israeli American Council in Washington on Sunday, said, “I don’t like journalism.” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer explains the anti-Adelson bill that advanced today: The law, proposed by MK Eitan Cabel (Knesset) and…
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…h that it could have mitigated some of the underlying social problems that today create fertile ground for drug-based economies and narco-violence throughout Latin America. The liberationist vision was taken up nowhere else more seriously as by the Diocese of Cuernavaca, under the leadership of the beloved “red bishop,” don Segio Méndez Arceo. Don Sergio saw that his priests were trained as community organizers, not in seminaries but rather in the…
Read More…Take Ataturk, father of an ostensibly Central Asian nation; he was born in today’s Macedonia, his features strikingly and suspiciously Slavic—blond hair and blue eyes. The 1990s war awakened many of these connections, and as Turkey in many respects challenges Ataturk’s legacy (especially his late 19th-century romantic European nationalism), the older truths of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage gain visibility. Not to resurrect empire, but to rediscover th…
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…summary or arbitrary executions.” More from OutRight Action International: Today [November 18], the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted to maintain language on sexual orientation and, gender identity (SOGI) in resolution A/C.3/71/L.38, on ‘Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions’. The resolution, which is introduced biennially in the Third Committee, urges States to protect the right to life of all people…
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…hostile mainstream and by necessity engendered by their western isolation. Today, that drive is motivated—as I’ve heard discussed among leading figures in Mormon Studies this week and as was hinted at in the Church’s own statement and a Deseret News editorial today—by the need to create an endowment capable of sustaining the global physical infrastructure of Mormonism (temples, churches, universities) even as the bulk of the Church’s population sh…
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…Thomas Head (1990) and Sarah McNamer (2010) have shown. Like Catholic nuns today, medieval women married Jesus in wedding ceremonies, replete with rings and gowns. Indeed, these marriages were functionally on par with marriages between two humans. And things could get messy when human-divine marriage and human-human marriage overlapped, as I show in my essay in Queer Christianities (NYU, 2014). This means that, for hundreds of years, medieval Chri…
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…ister in the mid-nineteenth century, now has fewer than a million members. Today the Mormons outnumber the church of the Pilgrims seven to one—and the Mormons are not ordaining any women. The church is the last institution in America where it is still legal to discriminate on the basis of gender. So, an ancient Christian credo declaring solidarity across ethnic lines, class division, and gender difference sounded a little unbelievable to someone w…
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…faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.” It’s not surprising, then, that the American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in a statement this afternoon,”Today’s opinion creates the Church of the Supreme Court, with President Obama serving as its High Priest.” That’s undoubtedly only the beginning of the overheated rhetoric to come. The majority opinion, though, gamed out all these arguments. “Man…
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…ubtler way, in that of another prominent figure of South Carolina politics today—Nikki Haley. When Haley suggested that the Civil War was about “economic freedom”—using “States’ Rights” rhetoric—she was only the latest in a long line of Republican politicians, from Goldwater to Nixon to Ronald Reagan himself—to use pseudo-libertarian, ahistorical rhetoric to pander to voters animated by racial grievances. The Republican Party’s path is historian H…
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