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How to Meet Muslims: A (Cinematic) Primer

…wn Planet Probably a third of the world’s Muslims live in or come from the Indian subcontinent, such as this writer, descended from the steamy plains of the Punjab but raised in gelid New England. And South Asia’s a part of the world we never stop hearing about. Of course, most of this attention is directed to Pakistan, so let’s start there.  In Silent Waters, we follow a young man from a small village impressed by the Islamist message coming from…

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Trump Administration Is Not-So-Subtly Christianizing Foreign Policy and Aid

…government—particularly foreign aid and arms—did not directly intervene to promote the narrative of global Christian victimhood. However, under Trump, foreign policy—particularly foreign aid—is increasingly being shaped in a pro-evangelical way. It shouldn’t surprise anyone given Pence’s constant affirmations of being a Christian first, while Pompeo has openly embraced a hardline Christian worldview that maligns non-Christians. Pompeo and Pence al…

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

…ovements were emerging in other traditions in other parts of the world. In India, for example, bhakti movements of social rebellion were erupting throughout the subcontinent, eschewing Brahmanical authority for the fellowship of devotees of a new breed of eclectic saints and teachers 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…

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“We Found My Father, Except for His Hand”

As we passed by the “Little India” shopping center, the driver of the car next to us began excitedly waving to one of our hosts. It turns out that they knew each other, though the man’s cheerfulness belied his true purpose. He’d been living in America for years now, like tens of thousands of other exiled Bosniaks, and had returned solely for the commemorations at Srebrenica. His father’s body had finally been found; or at least all of it, except…

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Dilemmas of American Empire: Can Obama Pull Off a Game-Changer in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan?

…ely an extreme version of normal American supremacism, one that explicitly promotes and heightens the U.S.’s routine practices of empire. But it matters greatly whether the American empire tries to work cooperatively and respectfully with other nations instead of conspiring mainly to dominate them. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East as a whole, the legacy of George W. Bush is not very good, and Obama has an overabundance of leftover c…

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Selective Sympathy and the Mumbai Chabad House

…finally appeared of the couple, performing a wedding a few months ago, in India. They looked like any one of my nieces or nephews, young newlyweds. Rivkah wears a sleek wig that others—not in the know—might mistake for her own hair (when I was growing up, wigs were more obviously wigs). But I knew Chabad, too, from my own travels. Everywhere I went, when I was still Orthodox, I could count on finding a kosher meal, a hospitable family, through th…

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What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right

…of social mores, cultural productions, religious practices, and political codes. As the United States continues under the fraught leadership of Donald Trump, we find new iterations of the “Christian nation,” new connections and clashes between immigration bans, the religious right, and women’s rights. But if oppression relies on strange alliances, so does resistance. Sowing the seeds of liberation often entails looking back to the past and reaffi…

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Trump Election Could Threaten LGBT Rights Globally

…on ORAM…. But activists in countries where US support has been critical to promoting LGBT rights say they are afraid more broadly that a Trump victory could tacitly encourage governments with weak commitments to human rights or democracy. “I don’t think he’d be able to hold our leaders accountable or uphold American values abroad,” said Clare Byarugaba, who co-chaired the coalition of groups in Uganda that fought the sweeping Anti-Homosexuality Ac…

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Religion is Not about Belief: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

…e religious, Armstrong explains: Religion as defined by the great sages of India, China, and the Middle East was not a notional activity but a practical one; it did not require belief in a set of doctrines but rather hard, disciplined work, without which any religious teaching remained opaque and incredible. The Ascent of Intellectual Orthodoxy For most of Western history, religion has been primarily a matter of orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. In fact,…

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Population Growth Divides Climate Change Advocates

…thoritative reports, the group does acknowledge that regions in Africa and India with extremely dense populations are most at risk to massive suffering.  The Catholic Church has studied and worked on issues of protecting the poor from climate change disaster for at least the last ten years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is one of four members of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (NRPE), which also includes th…

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