Religion Dispatches
…Western-style political leaders like the Shah. We live in that world still today, and it is in this sense that we did not need the September 11 attacks to learn that a certain form of neotraditional religiosity was alive and well around the world. What happened in the new century, and what has taken up a great deal of our cultural attention in the past decade, is that certain forms of neo-traditional religion became increasingly violent, very fas…
Read More…eligious traditions. There are bloody, vindictive religious traditions (as today’s not-so-new atheists insist on reminding us), and there are those which soften the human tendency toward vengeance and violence. Religion does not have the answer, because it has all the answers, the right and the wrong. Religion is less a glossary of terms (justice means this, righteousness that) than a grammar, a framework for moral reasoning. It is a language in w…
Read More…“Jewish problem:” In any case; educate yourself and learn the difference. Today’s conservatives and want to-be Nazis are ignorant when they obsess so much over the Jews. There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) ac…
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…r now ending — a response much too fixated on the epiphenomenon, as though today’s naked expressions of white nationalism can somehow be separated from the longer career of white supremacy. Making a show of their ethical colors, liberal faith leaders have organized and participated in routinized rituals of personal purification that do absolutely nothing to make the slightest dent in structural oppression. Not all, of course: to say that would be…
Read More…But, again, cultural memory can be a stupefying narcotic. Forty years ago today, on April 4, 1968, America was hardly on King’s side. His poetically articulated Dream of 1963 was long forgotten. King’s call for a more just society was interpreted as the fanatical delusions of a Negro radical in the mind of the American mainstream. Let’s face reality. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reputation as an American hero was mortally wounded well before the assa…
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…y reading them outside academia? The popular discussion about antisemitism today is sorely under-theorized. I just read an excellent new book, still in manuscript, by a young scholar on middle-brow Jewish writing in the mid 20th Century. One of the things she shows is that from 1945 to the early 1960s there were dozens of books written by rabbis and Jewish scholars about basic Judaism, such as Milton Steinberg’s Basic Judaism or Irving Howe’s Worl…
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…ther Dr. Freud or Allah was at work about my complaining yesterday, and so today I do not fast. In my younger lither days I would have to persevere through out the day fasting without suhur, but not now, not at my age, so I am having my tea as I type. No need to lie about it, no need to pretend. Missing this day is only an offense between me and Allah. The rules for remaking a day of missed fast, for what ever reason, will apply; and to these I hu…
Read More…a completely ineffectual as a political strategy. Harold Meyerson writes today of the Democrats “losing the big game” and how they “are getting clobbered” in the war of ideas: [T]he continual stream of crap coming from both Republicans and, of late, Obama on the theme that cutting government spending will actually create jobs seems to be taking hold. As my Washington Post colleague and buddy E. J. Dionne noted yesterday, when Pew asked responden…
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…ian Christian Lobby is attacking an anti-bullying program, arguing that it promotes “radical sexual experimentation.” From Pink News: The Safe Schools Coalition Australia (SSCA) scheme – which is also available in Victoria, Tasmania, The Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales – is fully federally funded and has been used to make schools in the area, as Brisbane Times puts, “more inclusive for same-sex attracted, intersex and gender diver…
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…ted slaves, he had little sympathy for the nascent labor movement at home. Today, as the abolition of modern slavery has become a favorite cause among young evangelicals, Wilberforce has become something of a hero to them; thanks in no small part to a 2006 biopic, Amazing Grace. As the new abolitionism enters the evangelical mainstream, however, it’s clear that his sin-suppressing instincts remain alive and well. Slavery becomes conflated in evang…
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