Religion Dispatches
…ut an end to the long 1990s when, as it is nearly inconceivable to imagine today, the biggest problem in our post-Communist, unipolar world seemed to be Monica Lewinsky. I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down the path I’d imagined, a quiet professional life in suburban America. This realiz…
Read More…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…
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…wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance of the far right in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet ironically, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed” now rules the state of Israel. Hartman may not be able to change that reality, so he wants to change the story. Is it possible, today, for one to not be a Zionist and still be p…
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…pioned by portions of the far-right Jewish and Christian Zionist movements today. Hungary: Against “liberal hegemony” Like so many others, Balázs Orbán, political advisor to Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (no relation), as well as the current chairman of Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Prime Minister Orbán’s crony factory, draws chuckles from the audience by framing NatCon in Brussels as a heroic resistance operation against…
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…ecarity with respect to the law. What is incumbent on religious protesters today is not just to fill up the jails, but to multiply. The Berrigans created their audience by being paid attention. And this is what religious protesters are doing brilliantly today: in protests, online, in their communities, even in their classrooms. The strategies are many, but the goals can only be achieved if attention increases. If movements form, rather than occasi…
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…ed of Hargis: “any comment short of adulation is considered a smear . . .” Today’s conservative evangelicals see any straying from what they consider God’s plan for America as a kind of national apostasy—the liberty of Bible believers was and is under threat. In this fear they bear the imprint of Hargis and his contemporaries. In January of 1963, for example, the Christian Crusade organized an anti-Communist rally in Boston. With vocal opposition…
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…fluence. This response has culminated in the position we find ourselves in today. We’ve ignored and mocked, while they’ve gathered momentum and built a contemporary movement held together by conspiracy, moral panics, and fear. The “groomer” panic we see today is a culmination of decades of adherence to conspiracy theories, that hold that women and feminists, are the ultimate weapon of the “great replacement” of white people. The seduction of sexua…
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…ions, developing a theory of “family values” that often fails in practice. Today, we can point to anything from the Catholic Church’s continued refusal to ordain women, to one of the nation’s most popular pastors calling us a “pussified nation,” to fierce national debates over abortion and birth control whose implicit terms are the assertion of control over women’s bodies. Though our jurisprudence is today unlikely to cite men’s divine responsibil…
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…vocacy is considerably more complex than is suggested by such accounts. To promote religious rights is to promote a particular mode of governing social diversity that implicates religion in complex and variable ways, depending on the context. Legal and political advocacy for religious freedom tends to mask other contributors to social tension and conflict, amplify and entrench the religious divisions it seeks to manage, and force political authori…
Read More…o criticized the verdict. “We are disappointed by the Federal Court ruling today to uphold the Appeals Court decision of March 2014 sentencing Mr. Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition leader, to five years in prison on charges of sodomy, a crime that should not exist under international human rights law,” he said in a statement. China: Alibaba marketing campaign promotes same-sex couples China’s social media behemoth Alibaba launched a marketing campaign…
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