Religion Dispatches
…ophet Muhammad, Muslim armies controlled the Middle East and much of North Africa. After only two more generations the Muslim empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to India while the Christian Byzantine Empire was forced into a rump state confined to Anatolia and a few provinces west of the Bosporus. The conquest was followed by extraordinary Muslim contributions to philosophy, economics, literature, and all the sciences. The success of Islam w…
Read More…hose black groups that are racist” or worse: “Obama should just go back to Africa.” But even more than that, I’m troubled by the Tea Party Movement’s invocation of the intentions of the founders as the “be all and end all” of Constitutional interpretation and their nostalgia for “states’ rights.” Even if you buy revisionist Christian American history which argues that the founders detested slavery and sought to facilitate the end of the institutio…
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…k the day, Ugandan President Museveni blamed the West for homosexuality in Africa. ”Europeans are putting us under pressure because of homosexuality. They think we are against it because of our religious background but even before religion was introduced in the country, we were against homosexuality and any form of sexual abuse,” the president said. In addition to Pasikali’s death, a priest, Rev Henry Kayizzi Nsubuga, who gave a pro-gay sermon a f…
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…f Zanzibar and the Master Drummers of Burundi. Although both are from East Africa, they demonstrated very different musical sensibilities. The large Zanzibari group was rhythmic and melodic, using lyrics to praise God and Prophet Muhammad. The Drummers were obviously percussion-heavy, and were ecstatic in their performance. This geographic nearness with a strong performative divergence helped to illustrate that geography is not sufficient to tie p…
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…terracial understanding (she and her husband Howard Thurman were the first African-Americans to meet with Mahatmas Gandhi). They and other black clubwomen logged many miles as members of the National Council of Negro Women, traveled the world in support of women’s rights, and were dogged supporters of education and the civil rights movement. They labored for the improvement of women’s lives through protest, dignity, and struggle, not self-help pab…
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…ment agencies also provide large amounts of money for Catholic projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There have been sporadic attempts to cut off such funds for various reasons and anger at the church over the sex abuse crisis is likely to strengthen those arguments. Atheist and secular groups are far more likely to lead those campaigns than progressive Catholics. Liberal members of the European Parliament just called on the president of th…
Read More…tific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. The Vatican’s abhorrent actions over the years (including then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s documented role in covering up sexual abuse) make it exceedingly difficult to say anythin…
Read More…the signatories, no doubt influenced by American evangelicalism brought to Africa and elsewhere, are themselves immigrants to Britain, or at least pastor a community of immigrants.) But like the Manhattan Declaration, the orientation of the Westminster Declaration is framed around the persecution of Christians by (in the case of the Manhattan Declaration) secular society and (in the case of the Westminster Declaration) secular society and Islam. T…
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…global consequences of Christianity’s shifting worldwide alignment to the southern hemisphere; particularly Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How this realignment—‘de-Europeanization’ might be overstating it, but not by much—of Christian communities in America affects politics, ecumenical relations, and inter-religious dialogue remains to be seen, but American Christianity today belies any notion of common ground or uniformity. Maybe it really is…
Read More…sed as a club to deny the human rights of girls and women from the Gulf to Africa to Asia and to discriminate, even advocating the execution of, gays and lesbians. I was almost as disappointed in Clinton as Obama since she failed to mention the country of Uganda at this point, but she continued: We are standing up for gays and lesbians who deserve to be treated as whole human beings and we are also making it clear to countries and leaders that the…
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