Religion Dispatches
…the Chinese be interested in my book? I am not sure. I wasn’t thinking of China or Vietnam when I was writing. I was thinking of Muslims and Americans, perhaps Westerners in general. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? Just inform—although I can’t control the last two outcomes. If I had to choose between pissing people off or giving them pleasure, I’d rather do the latter. But someone is still bound to get pi…
Read More
…applied to different cultures around the world. The essays on religion in China, Japan, Islamic societies, and the United States published in 1970 in his book of essays, Beyond Belief, illustrates that point. In his 1967 essay in Daedalus on “Civil Religion,” Bellah founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones. In this case it…
Read More…d to make common cause with every sensible Republican I can find. And with China. And with California. And speaking of the unlikeliest allies, perhaps even someone like ex-Exxon Rex Tillerson can help the President move into a more global story. During his confirmation hearing for Secretary of State, Tillerson made comments about international climate treaties that reflect a larger story. “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its…
Read More
…can be of mutual benefit. As a journalist, I’ve found that epoché is rule number one for reporting among people different from you. Lawyers often have to do something similar. It’s a basic part of how business works. For much of history, traders, rather than scholars, have led the way to discovering foreign cultures. Christians and Muslims were trading with each other during the Crusades, and Marco Polo made it to China centuries before Matteo Ri…
Read More
…age? What we call the Axial Age occurred in four different regions—India, China, Greece, and the Middle East—from about 900 to 200 BCE, during which time all the major world faith traditions which have continued to nourish humanity—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, philosophical rationalism, and monotheism, for example—either came into being or had their roots. Each tradition is wonderfully different; each has its own genius, and…
Read More
…s of Muslims live in majority non-Muslim dictatorships, such as Russia and China. But the best proof of Islam’s allergy to liberty is found in democratic Senegal. Independent in 1960, this 90%-Muslim country proceeded to elect a President, Leopold Senghor, who shared the Catholic religion of the country’s former colonizer (France). He was subsequently reelected four times, serving until 1980. How many European countries have had a non-Christian le…
Read More
…had given refugee families that had fled to the Phillipines from communist China. Notably this document establishes that Church custom, since at least the 13th century, was to minister to migrants in their native language. Pius XII also drew special attention to the example of the United States, “Toward the end of the 19th century… great waves of people left Europe and moved especially from Italy to America. As usual the Catholic Church devoted sp…
Read More
…n North America. I think that moral pathologies in other regions (Germany, China, for instance) show quite different symptoms. Maybe one time there will be a catalogue of the various forms of moral pathologies in different places and at different times. North American moral pathologies are related to what may be called the “narrative” of American identity and clearly stem, historically speaking, from the fusion of fundamentalist Protestantism and…
Read More…milarly, American methods of surveilling Muslims are now being exported to China in a global commodification of anti-Muslim policies and practices. The Nigerian government used Trump’s words calling for lethal force against rock-throwing migrants to justify killing rock-throwing Shi‘i protesters. War on Terror rhetoric has fueled indiscriminate massacres of Fulani villagers in Mali, simply because al-Qaeda’s branch in Mali has drawn heavily from e…
Read More
…n show that “modernized” or “modernizing” nations, like the United States, China, Australia, Thailand, Czech Republic, and many more are becoming less religious by the day. Plus, the authors see good reasons to believe that this trend will continue for years to come. Beyond Doubt is written like a victory speech. It delivers a comforting message to nonbelievers and anyone else worried that Christianity—particularly its evangelical iterations—will…
Read More