Search for "cheap airline tickets asia phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Noah’s All-White Ark, and Other Odd Directorial Choices

By Wil Gafney

…is telling. Aronofsky’s Noah is another dominant culture portrayal of Afro-Asiatic folk as white folk, like the History Channel miniseries on the Bible which portrayed virtually everyone in biblical Israel, the intersection between Africa and Asia, as white. (Some even had Scottish accents. The thuggish, dreadlocked Samson was a notable, race-baiting, exception. I blogged about that series here.) This matters because the Noah story has particular…

10 Years Later: An American Muslim Looks Back at Iraq

By Haroon Moghul

…and that opened the door to the rise of new powers in South America and in Asia. This is how, in years approaching, historians will make sense of it. If they even can. Was it just racism? Who, after all, does not plan for the day after a war? I plan out what I am going to do when I drive up to New York to see friends and family. Maybe it was just racism. They’re Iraqis, who cares what happened to them? Maybe power really does blind, and you think…

Solidarity Through Veiling? Backlash Has Been “Personal, Fierce and Vile…”

By Sarah Eltantawi

…their version of Islam around the world. At the same time, Arabs and South Asians began to work in Saudi Arabia in huge numbers and brought a new and more conservative understanding of Islam back to their home countries. Combine this with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and we have a significant percentage of the Muslim majority world experiencing this moment. – In view of these last two points, it is interesting to read the many threads that mak…

Creationist Theme Park Gets $43 Million in Tax Rebates

By Lauri Lebo

…g the question of how all the different species could have fit on the Ark, Asia’s Tarbosaurus looks so much like North America’s Tyrannosaurus that some evolutionary paleontologists suggest that they should be considered the same species. The study authors found a list of clear similarities between their Tarbosaurus specimen and tyrannosaurs, including the “D-shaped” cross-section of the teeth and the distinctive two-fingered tiny forearms. It is…

Indonesia Allows Abusive Sharia Laws to Stand; Kenyan Priest Joins Challenge to Anti-LGBT Laws; Dominican Republic Bishop Slams ‘Gender Ideology’ at OAS; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…abusive Sharia rules Phelim Kine, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, reports that “Indonesia’s Minister of Home Affairs Tjahjo Kumolo backtracked on a pronounced commitment to abolish abusive Sharia regulations in the country.” More from Kine’s dispatch: Kumolo said last week that the government chose to ignore discriminatory Sharia or Islamic law-based local regulations while cancelling 3,143 other “problematic regional regul…

Thanksgiving Reveals More About Us Than About 17th Century Events

By Ed Simon

…namese refugees. Following the United States’ disastrous wars in Southeast Asia, the humble dinner was meant to return to certain values shared by both the promise of the holiday, but also the ethic of care exemplified in Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. The cooperation between religious communities and government—so vividly on display in the fall of 1979—has broken down. Refugee resettlement has emerged as a starkly partisan issue, and go…

Love the Scholarship But Hate the Scholar’s Sin?: ‘Himpathy’ for an Academic Pedophile Enables a Culture of Abuse

By Stephen Young

…ld porn on his computer, including of child rape. Many of the victims were Asian children. So we have another entry in the long history of white men participating in the violent subjugation of non-white people. But, as in so many instances of men in positions of power who are outed as abusers, the story doesn’t end there. The story should end with patriarchy because that’s where the pervasive phenomenon of men abusing others begins. It’s where the…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…re recent writing you refer more frequently to stories and traditions from Asia; Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Jainism all play a role in your more recent works. And you seem to find in them powerful examples of the kind of practical, effective action that you long to see in today’s world. You even end The Case for God with a Buddhist story. I wonder whether your thinking about the Charter for Compassion has been influenced by your encounter wit…

How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…hers who could be outcastes, blind, female, or partly Muslim. Elsewhere in Asia, what has been called a “Protestant Buddhism” was appealing to the masses in the way that a more orthodox clerical order could never do. What Bellah was exploring in these two books—one recently published and the other, alas, eternally to be unfinished—was a new subject of religious studies: global religion. This is a field of study that tries to show the connection b…

Coronavirus Exposes the Religious Right’s Racism

By Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead and Joseph O. Baker

…d to be plagued with “the social and political diseases of the Old World.” Asians in particular, and to a lesser extent Eastern Europeans, were deemed less worthy than immigrants from parts of Europe populated by those more likely to be “White” and “Protestant,” which have often been historically been understood to mean the same thing. Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign, which was successful due in no small part to his appeals to white Christian n…