Religion Dispatches
…nything Al Jazeera decides to transform into yet another symbol of Zionist bestiality, eventually we will hear evidence that Palestinian propagandists and their media allies have distorted the truth. When Israel assaulted the West Bank village of Jenin during the second intifada, at first the international media alleged that hundreds of innocent Palestinians had been massacred, and that bulldozers had crushed houses and destroyed property for no d…
Read More…ssive,” and says he overlooks the majority of biblical scholars. He’s also particularly peeved by Savage’s description of biblical perspectives of slavery: “If we want to have a debate let’s do it civilly,” he says. “Let’s look at the best scripture scholar. Sam Harris is not one of the best scripture scholars.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say someone who invites you into their home is lacking civility when they quote a writer you don’t like. Check…
Read More…phere. Lowering a body into the ground and allowing it to decompose may be best for the planet. However, state laws often mandate the use of coffins. But ecology is not the only issue. Rabbi Andy Bachman of Brooklyn Jews, an organization dedicated to helping young Jews build meaningful connections with their faith, has presided over multiple funerals involving cremation. “The horse is out of the gate,” says Bachman. “People are choosing to cremate…
Read More…hrases are mine: • Postmodern perspectives are a two-edged sword: they can promote new kinds of dialogue, but they can also collapse into an extreme relativism that is scarcely productive. Fair enough; the danger is real. Saying that science is “just another linguistic system” plays well in humanities departments and at certain Ivy League divinity schools. But it makes about as much contact with real science as astrology does. Still, major cultura…
Read More
…in the runaway success of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s. At the same time evangelicals, although scorning Hollywood, turned to modern technology to preach Armageddon. The result was the cult phenomenon A Thief in the Night, an Armageddon-themed film that popularized one of the first pop Christian hits, Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The movie scared countless teenagers (and…
Read More
…and established emissary posts there). Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and u…
Read More
…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…
Read MoreThere’s an old adage in politics that the best way to kill a political career is to be found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. It may be time to add an addendum to the adage: be nice to a Muslim. ”Not since the election of John Kennedy (a Catholic) in 1960 has the religious faith of a US presidential candidate generated so much distortion as the false claims generated by extremist critics that Senator Barack Obama, the candidate of the Democ…
Read More…men’s exclusive access at designated times. I have a plan, and Allah knows best. I will do whatever the rest of the day might dictate to get as much access within the limited times as I can. I like my shaykh’s advice to seek as much of the nur or light of Muhammad (saw) as I can. My shaykh, and many Sufi teachers talk about Nur-Muhammad. Some go as far as to say the whole universe was created only after Nur-Muhammad. Or that the whole of the unive…
Read More…n the world, cannot resort to debating which interpretation of the text is best, as though the texts exist independent of the people who read them. So Islam can be violent, and so can Christianity. Thankfully other Muslims and Christians want to say that those folks are not “really Muslim,” or “really Christian.” But if all we have is that which scholars call “insider discourse,” then conversations across religious divides become, at worst, dising…
Read More