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Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

…xceptionalism that we have promoted for millennia from the Hebrew Bible to today? It is, in a way, the dark side of chosenness. If we say, “God, who is the creator of the universe, chooses the Jews above all others,” and promote that view by pointing to holy scripture, is it surprising that some of those others will hold negative opinions of us? This is what Spinoza argued. If you think this sounds provocative, it’s actually sewn into our very tra…

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The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

…mer Confederate states could contribute to that project. If you are one of today’s activist allies who thinks that doing better today than those feckless Abolitionists did back then amounts to a low bar, please think again—and don’t flatter yourself. There are no shortcuts and no quick fixes to be had in meeting the challenge we face now. It’s going to be a revolution—a new social contract with new power arrangements—or nothing. Beware of any fait…

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Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill Reintroduced in Parliament Today

…nfamous kill-the-gays bill has been reintroduced in Parliament. The bill stalled last year in the face of international pressure, including condemnation from the U.S. State Department, but its backers have never given up. The legislation and the violent anti-gay rhetoric promoted by its supporters have been part of a wave of anti-gay campaigns in Africa backed by American anti-gay evangelicals. That campaign has had deadly consequences: just over…

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Election Day: Hope, Heartbreak, Naiveté, and Studs Terkel

…of the land, even he had to admit something in America was now different. Today, regardless of which side wins, history will be made. Forty-five years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. hoped that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Isn’t that what every religion seeks—a time when the service and character of each individual is recognized…

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Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

…undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promoted destructive values. To label something a “soap opera” today still implies that what you are describing involves immature behavior, improbable plot twists, and/or unseemly sexual liaisons. Soap opera fans themselves have consistently been characterized as immature, psychologically weak, or missing something crucial in their lives. As a result, those who watch soaps…

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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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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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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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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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