Religion Dispatches
…this year), Benedict prepared a statement on social networking platforms. Expressing again his deep anxiety about “authenticity” in the media age, Benedict warns that “the significance and effectiveness of the various forms of [online] expression appear to be determined more by their popularity than by their intrinsic importance and value.” One can imagine the pope wringing his hands in frustration at the lack of civility in online arguments about…
Read More…its members brutally beaten, by members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. The klansmen had expected to find Michael Schwerner, a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality. Schwerner and two of his CORE colleagues—James Earle Chaney and Andrew Goodman—were actually in Ohio at the time, but heard of the Mt. Zion burning and came back to Mississippi to investigate. They were pulled over, arrested, released, tailed, and…
Read More
…ady lived. Yes, this is literary drama. Yet what we have in the Spiritual Exercises is a textual practice minus the page: it is the individual life that forms the plot in question, to be read and edited; places that require improvement are to be marked; and the text re-read, a small dot made here, a nota bene there—and this process to be repeated again and again. The Exercises demand that the Jesuit remain attentive to the way in which the compone…
Read More…e, the most important thing an individual can do. Let me just give you an example—this goes on year after year—Dr. Paul has been a consistent promoter of Second Amendment legislation. He’s already mentioned the United Nations, well, he’s got a bill to get us out of the United Nations, he doesn’t just talk about it. And the reason the Second Amendment folks are so interested in that is because the UN right now, under Hillary Clinton, the State Depa…
Read More…religious tradition that pledged loyalty to only one human being—dead approximately two thousand years—it’s difficult to understand how others can embrace the tremendous risks involved in putting one’s faith in a live person. Christians have long been inspired, of course, by stories of highly-committed early Christian disciples and martyrs. But, conveniently for most of us (at least in the West), we need not make ourselves emotionally or physicall…
Read More
…al narratives in service of the state can be). Thus we observe that later exegetes and jurists began to make frequent exceptions to the injunction against committing aggression contained in Qur’an 2:190 and preferred to understand the verse as mandating primarily non-combatant immunity without placing any restriction on the Muslim army’s ability to commence fighting. This progressive watering-down in later exegetical and legal literature of the ca…
Read More…nguish himself from his pal John McCain who seems willing to differentiate between extremist Muslims and the mainstream faithful. Those are important points, but they all overlook what is, perhaps, the most troubling aspect of this mini-scandal: it fits within a growing pattern of elite non-Muslims misappropriating Islamic phrases and insisting that the most extreme interpretations or uses are the correct ones. Think about the term “jihad.” It’s o…
Read More…oulder and praised him, saying, “We’ve gotten phone calls from military members who are undergoing discrimination…and with the exception of him, those folks that have called us have all wanted to remain anonymous. Sergeant Monk, to his credit, is willing to stand up.” Let’s read between the lines here: Monk is, quite literally, the best example of discrimination against Christians in the military that the Liberty Institute could find. He was chos…
Read More…and nationalism, dynamics I discuss in depth in my book, The Babylon Complex (Oxford University Press, 2014). A reboot of the older Jack Ryan series—based on Tom Clancy novels like Hunt for Red October—Shadow Recruit uses an all new screenplay by Adam Cozad and David Koepp. Still, the film is highly reminiscent of the earlier series’ conservative patriotism, and Clancy’s avowed “God and country and family” Catholicism. As the story goes, Jack Ryan…
Read More…with. Naimasiah also criticizes western gay-rights activists who “posit sexuality and sexual desires as necessarily political identities” and writes that “To be homosexual in Uganda should surely be different in its history, its interaction with other identities and, therefore, in the possibilities that must be imagined, than in the US.” United Kingdom: Muslim Group Welcomes Gay-Rights Activist Tell Mama, a group that monitors anti-Muslim prejudi…
Read More