Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…their punching bag, bringing us into the company of those great threats to Western civilization, including gay marriage, Latinos, and a president simultaneously godless and Muslim. I still think back to that day, and wish I’d stood up and said: Those people are not us, and their beliefs are not Islam. But these are the kinds of moments we learn from. It may not be fair to American Muslims that we must prove we are not those who have tortured Islam…
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…ountries, not least because freedom of religion is guaranteed. Despite the western media’s flattening of shari’ah to not much more than an alarm, Abdul-Rauf brings to the concept evidence of classical training and attitudes. For Rauf, like halakha in the Jewish tradition, shari’ah is a way of life that is protected by Constitutional guarantees, themselves a manifestation of what he sees as the goals of shari’ah. In the end, Rauf argues that there…
Read More…he American Enterprise Institute, “stealth jihad” is an effort “to replace Western civilization with a radical imposition of Sharia.” As someone points out on Talking Points Memo, we fortunately have a federal law against the imposition of religious law in the country. It’s call the First Amendment. The Revealer, in an almost prescient move, has been running a series on the meaning of shari’ah that stands as a good counter to this report by Team B…
Read More…ning more global control, instead of the dominating U.S superpower and her western allies. Fantastic as it really is. I think such an outcome would still leave a gaping spiritual void. I have little confidence that Muslims gaining more political power to control the world would really make a better life for all the oppressed and exploited people of the world. I see very little from our current political leaders that would give me such confidence….
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…f one sitcom, of course, but this one does raise interesting questions: Is Western antipathy toward nature spirituality eroding? Is it becoming more conventionally acceptable to mock religion? Does nature religion hold particular appeal for post-theists, or agnostics? Will we see in our popular media more expressions of nature spirituality, going forward? I would not argue that golfing should be understood as a new nature religion. I do think, how…
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…r for Empire to feel secure. Crossan had people chuckling over images from Western art (Titian, especially) showing Jesus bounding out of the tomb with a buff West Hollywood gym body. Crossan maintains that a heroic solo victory over death and defeat is not what Jesus achieves at the end—and is certainly not how he would want to be remembered. The earliest images of anastasis (resurrection) preserved in Eastern Church shrines show Jesus taking Ada…
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…the Tibetan self-immolations has failed to garner much attention from the Western media. Time called it the most under-reported story of 2011, and the coverage has not improved, despite more than 100 additional deaths since the end of 2011. There is a profound sense of desperation and frustration on the Tibetan plateau. This is known to all who are familiar with the tragic situation in contemporary Tibet. The Tibetans who engage in the drastic ac…
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