Religion Dispatches
…at a luncheon table at this fancy-shmancy Islam and America conference in Qatar, a white guy at my table said, “That’s ridiculous. No one is American by force.” I said, “Well, now that is interesting. What about generations of slaves? There was no sign over the port when slave ships pulled in warning, “America, love it or leave it.” Surely we would have left then if we could.” The thing is, however historical events unfold, the story is not being…
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…dly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied—kind of. In fact, says Peggy Bowman, who worked for nearly a decade as Dr. Tiller’s spokesperson, the clinic never closed, but instead snuck inside a number of late-term patients who couldn’t delay their abortions, and kept them there, sleeping on cots and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for severa…
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…the Old Testament because they’re long and boring…” Here pauses. “Granted, Numbers is like…” “I like Numbers, but anyway…” mumbles Caleb. “The real impetus for the game,” Thomas resumes, “is to get people to engage in Scripture and read stories they’ve never read before. When a concubine is cut up into twelve pieces, that imagery is really offensive. But a lot of people didn’t even know that story existed in the Bible.” I suspect they’re right; re…
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…Across Empire. It’s a model of transnational scholarship, but also makes a number of fascinating claims regarding the mutual cultural and intellectual affinities among German and Indian intellectuals. What’s your next book? I’m currently co-writing for Oxford University Press a book titled Modern Germany: A Global History, 1500-present. What makes the project interesting to me—and hopefully our audience—is that we’re trying to tell the history of…
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…e duty of punishing the wicked and protecting the righteous. If the public officials decide to officially approve of the acts of the wicked, they must logically not protect the righteous from the wicked. In fact, they must become protectors of the wicked. You cannot serve two masters; you must pick – God or Satan. This characterization derives from Christian Reconstructionist theology, says Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of religious studies…
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…dent, she was worried that another Russian national (i.e., not the Russian Official) would attempt to seize the initiative, as demonstrated in her Twitter conversation with the Russian Official: Butina: It would be good if you could talk directly with the MFA or the administration. Before [Russian national who attended the breakfast] worms his way in there. Russian Official: Everything will be fine. I already conducted the necessary informal consu…
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…freedom-loving urban constituency. Throughout Afghanistan people have cell phones and access to the internet. It’ll be difficult to have the same kind of social control two decades later. Another factor is the way the Taliban came to power in recent months. In February 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo represented President Donald Trump in meetings with Taliban representatives in Qatar. Trump essentially surrendered to the Taliban in excha…
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…running through one another. The appeal of these ideologies has died for a number of reasons, which I discussed in a previous essay. Before we hyperventilate over the possibility of an Iran on the Nile, let’s keep in mind that the Brotherhood is not the dominant force in these protests, its political ideology is weakly formed, its political vision is an ambiguous articulation of an ideological moment that has passed; there’s not much reason to ass…
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…ation about Egypt from within. Over the past week, others have mentioned a Qatari conspiracy to defame Egypt, along with foreign elements to destabilise Egypt. Others insisted that all this upheaval was the fault of external actors, not domestic ones—and those who appeared to be domestic were simply stooges of outside forces. No one knows anything anymore. The Friday congregational prayer is one of those canonical observances for all Muslim men re…
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…get a bill far larger than you expected. (In that case, wars are like cell phones.) We have a right to know just how much can be spent on uncertain military objectives, and it would be nice to know whether that much money could be spent, without consulting Congress, on the betterment of the condition of the American people. The roads around my apartment need repair. Can we get NATO to send some army engineers in? New York City also desperately nee…
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