Religion Dispatches
…ening the hand of the poor and needy” is regarded as socialist anathema by today’s Tea Party zealots, the Tea Party has more in common with the Sodomites than do gays or lesbians. Likewise in text after text after text, Sodom’s wickedness is connected to cruelty, injustice, and deceit—never homosexuality. Jeremiah 23:14: I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem a horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the…
Read More…ght. If anything, the struggle for gay rights in so many African countries today tells us about a continent still battling the demons of colonialism, a continent that is still in the process of negotiating an identity – as articulated, again, through the lens of the colonial master. Among the greatest challenges many African democracies face today are the continued existence of one-party states and the lack of strong civil institutions. And, in th…
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…societal and cultural reckoning, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of t…
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…ss of pretense. Our old friend self-deception But the hypocrisy we witness today may not be so much acts of pretense and public false performance as self-deception. In Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, Béla Szabados and Eldon Soifer suggest that our perception of hypocrisy has shifted in modern times. If Biblical and Medieval thinkers saw hypocrisy primarily as a matter of pretense, of the difference between the inner morality and outward perform…
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…ome specifics about Islam in those parts of the world germane to our lives today. American attitudes towards Iran and Iraq, not to mention our foreign policy choices, would be much more sound if we spent some time learning how to distinguish between Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi Islam, and about which political movements in Iran and Iraq believe Muslim clerics should run the government versus those that do not. If we had understood those distinctions in…
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…, without the pressures of the kind of faceless international trade we see today. Today consumers face a more insidious question: What if the very morality of such a “local” act is being marketed in its own right? What if we are told in advertising campaigns that it’s about participating in a “local” culture which is “authentically” ours, when that culture is neither local nor authentic? The problem for global consumers today is that all marketpla…
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…stion for the United States than race. This was wrong in 2007. It is wrong today. Not only does it understate the challenge of the color line. It also overstates the role of faith. Yes, religious ideas are involved in conflict. But they rarely appear alone. The two most virulent forms of religious prejudice in America today—Islamophobia and anti-Semitism—are largely about xenophobia and the construction of Islam and Judaism as racial categories. A…
Read More…han same-sex marriage will ever do.” (UPDATE: Mohler addresses the article today in his daily podcast, The Briefing.) But what if marriage, overall, isn’t on the rocks because of the so-called “divorce culture,” but is actually more stable precisely because of the very factors the Christian right frequently points to as causes of the “decline” of marriage: feminism, the broadening of reproductive rights and options, and cohabitation? Miller explai…
Read More…at the end of World War 2. And India provides a cautionary tale for Israel today. The terrifying moral they provide is that “two-state solutions” do not work, if we imagine working as the creation of stable borders and relatively peaceable neighbors. When it was clear in 1946-7 that the British would leave the Indian subcontinent, then the great post-colonial question emerged: how many countries should be created out of what were previously vast c…
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…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…
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