Religion Dispatches
…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read More…soul) damned.” To be lost is not merely a geographic problem for marooned airline passengers, or for men unwilling to stop and ask for directions—it’s a spiritual and moral condition. These days a google search turns up over 500,000,000 hits (that’s half a billion); not too surprising for a basic and often-used term. Similar numerical results come from google searches on terms like “run” and “hide.” Meanwhile, “found” yields over 1.3 trillion hit…
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…l partner” of the French anti-marriage-equality group, La Manif Pour Tous. France: LePen wants to dump marriage equality, Macron declares sympathy for ‘humiliated’ Catholics The National Front’s Marine LePen is proposing to reverse the country’s marriage equality law and replace it with some form of civil union for same-sex couples. Meanwhile, one of her opponents in the presidential race, Emmanuel Macron, said that the government had made a “fund…
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…oded “global elite” trying to rule the world.) The origins of this myth in France have to be seen against the backdrop of French colonial history, especially the fear of white slave owners of slave uprisings when it comes to the construction of the social in- and out-group. The “Great Replacement” became more widely known after Jean Raspail published his novel Le Camp des saints in 1973, which details an invasion of France by “dark-skinned” refuge…
Read More…im “continue, what you do (for the downtrodden) is good”. A story in Ouest France quotes Gaillot talking about blessing the union of a gay couple: ”I am in civil clothing and I just bless them. This is not a marriage, it is a blessing. We have the right to give the blessing of God, after all we also bless houses! The pope listened, he seemed open to all that. At that particular moment, he specifically said that to bless people also involves to spe…
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…emean a whole race or culture, in the case of Muslims. Algerian Muslims in France already feel demeaned, and for many the cartoons were the last straw. But no matter the keenly-felt injury of satire there is nothing, as so many have said this week, that could justify the brutality of this attack—or any similar vengeful violence. There is plenty of satire that angers or wounds religious folk without causing violence—the 1989 photograph of a statue…
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…is wedded to the first amendment idea of freedom of religious practice. In France, no such complementary relation between secular and religious freedom exists. Laïcité is the kind of secularism that is anti-religion, anti-religious expression, and anti-religious identity. They are the ones that give secularism such a bad name in most parts of the world that still consider religion a part of identity. A really good book on this particular aspect is…
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…f thousands of Muslims, from Senegal to Bengal, who fought for Britain and France in World War II, and so helped save Europe from itself.) Unanswered: Where are these Muslims to go? What are they to do? Caldwell hints that Muslims should convert to Christianity, or otherwise detach themselves from their spiritual identity, but fundamentally he feels it is too late. Islam confronts Europe and Europe is likely to lose: Because Islam is in no mood fo…
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…abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which are still active. The protests so shaped the city that, 22 years later, both sides recall the fight vividly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied…
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…grants from their homes. They are pulled to the U.S. because of demand for cheap labor. One of the major pushes came in the ’90s with the passage of NAFTA, which opened the door to many agri-businesses to move farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As…
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