Religion Dispatches
In a book geared toward the general reader, scholar Anne Norton confronts Islamophobia in the West and argues against the persistent notion that Islam and the West are locked in a cosmic battle.
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“We really need to get rid of Ex-Gay groups. I would like to see Christians, en masse, abandon these groups, to recognize that they don’t work. If they want to help people be celibate because that’s what they believe people are called to do, more power to them, but to tell people they can become straight and torture them psychologically is incredibly wrong.”
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The latest work to contend with the brutality of Jonestown begs the question: why are we still reliving this tragedy nearly 35 years later?
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The folks most likely to be alienated by Daniel’s book are, unsurprisingly, the seekers—those who call themselves SBNR, of course, but also those who want religious community, or at least want to want it. For these folks, who may be, as she says, “shopping” for a place to belong, Daniel has absolutely no patience.
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Ten Questions for Benjamin Morse.
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What McLaren is after is a Christian faith that is not automatically hostile to other faiths and to no faith: he calls this “strong-benevolent” Christianity, observing along the way that only active peacemakers can really claim to be connected to God with any real degree of credibility—a point that should be obvious but isn’t.
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“Today we’d probably call Darwin something of a seeker. You might say he’s something of a proto-None.”
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“For me, as a queer person of color and an Asian American who is also gay, I often feel like I’m never able to bring the two together, I’m always forced to choose. Will I be Asian American today or gay today? In the LGBT community, even where I feel really safe, I rarely hear anything that affirms my cultural background or the racism of notions of beauty in the community.”
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Western experts, looking for a comprehensible narrative, mistake consistency for fact. The misconceptions are further compounded by how difficult it is to identify a potential suicide—even mental health professionals can get it wrong—and how easy it is to conflate suicide terrorists with regular terrorists, the vast majority of whom don’t strap on bombs, preferring to stay alive and fight.
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“I wanted to write a book that looked at what happened when you forced individuals and communities, as well as the environment, to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The best way to do this was to go to the nation’s sacrifice zones, those poorest pockets of the country that had been exploited first, to show what happens when you allow the marketplace to rule.”
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