Religion Dispatches
…at work, of course, but I’m admitting to it—and redressing an imbalance in Western media coverage. So, yes, I have little in common with Kemalists, a secularist elite. And, yes, it’s easier for me to get religious Turks to open up to me. But what I found? That speaks to all of Turkey. There are at least three kinds of religious Turks. Aligned firmly with Erdogan’s AKP, there are big businessmen, dynamic capitalists, those in the pursuit of faith a…
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…s, which sometimes but not always will make it to the front pages of major Western newspapers. More clever op-ed pieces will be written insinuating that it’s not extremist Islam that’s responsible for such barbarities but Islam itself. Other, more level-headed essays will warn of overreacting to violent fringe elements in any religious tradition and warn against besmirching Muslims en masse on the basis of the actions of a few. It’s all too depres…
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…lem, indeed within all of Israel—which they define as stretching as far as western Iraq. They believe that the signs of the coming of the Messiah have already appeared; it will not be long now. The thousands of years of waiting are about to end. Of course, there are those who wish to hurry the time along and remove the mosques from the Temple Mount in advance of the Messiah’s arrival. The anti-Islamic position of these groups is inflexible and run…
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…fail to recognize when their criticism fits into longstanding patterns of Western culture’s abuse of Jews. Churchill’s play is motivated by earnest, if doctrinaire, anger and grief at the carnage created by the Israeli incursion, and the suffering endured under prolonged occupation. But, as a non-Jewish playwright expressing this grief through a series of appropriated and simplified Jewish voices, playing up the bloodthirst, and offering it to a…
Read More…nipulate invisible forces are all regarded with suspicion by contemporary, Western, secular audiences. Likewise disturbing are two central practices: the sacrifice of animals and spirit possession. The former is bloody, the latter theatrical and sometimes violent, as dancing practitioners lapse into ritual trances and are “ridden” by loas from the Voodoo pantheon. Such acts strike many outsiders as “Satanic,” an inaccurate but nonetheless damaging…
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…lit up by fireworks. The next time you hear about the next great threat to Western civilization, please remember what happened the last time. They say that Americans who came of age after September 11 have known only permanent war. We are not the only ones. For all the Americans and Iraqis who died because a war was prosecuted for no discernible reason, with no plan in mind, with no hope but to topple one regime after another—as if these were not…
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…using this tragic event to spark Islamophobia. Tolerance is a hallmark of Western democracies. A core tenet of democratic societies is the freedom of religious and political expression, and even the most obnoxious and ridiculous views must be tolerated. Bad ideas are best conquered with good ideas rather than with repression. Yet, the anti-civil liberties orientation of Christian politicians and pundits appears to be shared by several prominent a…
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…ally participatory, dialogical, and collaborative nature of a contemporary Western culture informed by digital social technologies. It inadvertently reinforces a line between “faith” and “life” that believers now routinely transgress. Bible Mash-Up Where religious institutions and their leaders struggle with this cultural transition, religiously committed innovators fill the breach. In an insightful essay in Cultural Encounters, Benjamin Meyers ex…
Read More…nd makes profits off of returns on investment, interest, and so on—usury. Western civilization’s original usury laws are found in the Bible. The Torah contains several prohibitions against lending money at interest, and the New Testament several condemnations of it. Deuteronomy 23:20-21 is representative, here in the King James (why not): “Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any t…
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…is said in the Bible, for instance, we would be forced to abandon most of Western religious art.) All of which is simply to point out that attention to parallels with biblical and ancient Jewish and Christian sources reveal the degree to which “Noah” participates in a long tradition of storytelling about the Flood. As in the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees, so too in Aronofsky’s Noah: new and old elements are interwoven to create stories that s…
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