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What Can Ancient India Tell Us About Our World?

…lya struggled in sophisticated ways with the issues that bedevil our world today: What is the role of ethics in the economy and management of the state? To what extent can we practice non-violence in international relations? Is it possible to reconcile a realist approach to politics with ethical values? Ashoka and Kautilya also undertook practical measures which even today have something to teach us. Both advocated the establishment of extensive n…

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Undercover Bosses as Minor Divinities: What Ever Happened to ‘Take this Job and Shove It’?

…cknowledged the reality of great wealth but were less inclined than people today to view the possession of wealth as particularly virtuous. One might say that popular culture today has raised the assigned social value of wealth—or has valorized it, to use the old Marxist term. Parallel to this valorization is the relatively new and completely unrealistic expectation on the part of people with bupkes that they might suddenly be the possessors of gr…

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Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

…e only relevant for their own time, this would mean none of it is relevant today. It’s only the continuing relevance of the whole Bible, including the curses, that would give modern Israel a claim to ancient roots. The “settler colonialist” critique is that today’s Israel is less an offshoot of ancient history and more a modern project made possible by Western European empires. Without the direct relevance of the Bible, that’s harder to deny. Yet…

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Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?

…edieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative…

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Interview with Karen Armstrong

…gton introduced the theory of a “clash of civilizations” we are witnessing today. Does such a fundamental incompatibility between the “Christian West” and the “Muslim World” indeed exist? The divisions in our world are not the result of religion or of culture, but are politically-based. There is an imbalance of power in the world, and the powerless are beginning to challenge the hegemony of the Great Powers, declaring their independence of them; o…

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Who’s Smearing Obama?

…deration of Abu Hanifah (d. 767 CE) and the Hanafi school that he founded (today’s largest). In Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, Yohanan Friedmann shows how Abu Hanifah and his followers discouraged executions in practice by ruling that it was mandatory to make an attempt to induce apostates to recant before carrying out any sentence—others considered this process, called istitaba, optional—and in other cases scholars went so far as to for all pra…

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Obama at Romero’s Tomb: The Politics of Liberation

…violence, figures like Romero give us hope. As Romero prophetically stated, “I should tell you that, as a Christian, I don’t believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” The Salvadoran people today, the Catholic Church as a whole, and all who stand as defenders of human rights and denounce injustice should take after Obama and spend a moment remembering this modern-day martyr who did not…

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Savoring the Haterade: Why Jews Love Dara Horn’s ‘People Love Dead Jews’

…them in Israel—it really doesn’t matter. And thus even those “people” who today “love” Israel will eventually prefer to see them dead. In short, as Horn sees the world, Zionism is ironically a failure. Fear is the new middlebrow The third point takes us back to the middle of the twentieth century, just after the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust. As Rachel Gordan has recently and persuasively shown, in those decades there were a pleth…

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As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort

…021, 9 states had passed and 20 states had introduced bills that are being promoted as banning CRT. Part of the answer lies in the unique cultural moment we are inhabiting as a country. As I argued in my 2016 book, The End of White Christian America, the visceral nature of today’s white conservative politics is driven by its desperate need for new mechanisms for ensuring white supremacy amid America’s changing demographics, particularly the loss o…

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Monstrous Futures: Dungeons & Dragons, Harbinger of the “None” Generation, Turns 40

…lity, but a dive into progressive dreams about what the world ought to be. Today’s media marketplace was constructed on a scaffold of adventures, role-played in the depths of the night, fueled by pizza, soda, and dreams. Today’s videogames are the highest grossing entertainment medium in the world, and they are the direct descendants of D&D. These digital worlds populated by monsters and magic were made possible by The Monster Manual. That volume,…

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