Religion Dispatches
…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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…or serendipitous. Can you describe that? If you stumbled upon the material today, how might the book be different? As I mentioned in the book, when I came across the file on Benedetta Carlini in 1978, I was actually working on other projects. The issue of same-sex relations in convents was not anything I had thought about until then and, from the reactions of several other scholars with whom I discussed the material after I found it, apparently…
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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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…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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…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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…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…
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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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