Religion Dispatches
In The Mirage, 9/11 is actually 11/9, the day when Christian fundamentalists from Texas slammed airliners into Baghdad skyscrapers, sparking a war on terror that rages across a nearly unrecognizable North America. Will Americans go for a book where the world power is the United Arab States and the lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslims?
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Not since The Israel Lobby has a Jewish book evoked so much ire and criticism from the American Jewish community.
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Sadakat Kadri’s Heaven on Earth is the kind of book that can appeal to the curious, as well as the intellectually serious—that strange product which actually leaves you knowing more about Islam than you did before you started.
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Recently, Mitt Romney has been referring to the Israeli Prime Minister as ‘my friend,’ and invoking memories of the short period when the two ambitious young businessmen were working for the same Boston consulting firm in the 1970s. The elder Netanyahu’s death has given Romney yet another opportunity to position himself as ‘pro-Israel’—or in his words, a champion of “all who care about Israel.”
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It’s usually clear to Bart Ehrman who loves him and who hates him. Evangelical Christians have been raking Ehrman over the coals for years for his rejection of biblical inerrancy—and atheists and humanists have embraced his writing as ammunition in the fight against the evils of organized religion. In his new book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman debunks the work of so-called “mythicists”—writers who have argued that a man named Jesus who taught about the coming Kingdom of God never really existed, and that the religions created around him are nothing but fantasy.
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As Egyptian protests rock the casbah, the U.S. responds with cautious words and a noncommittal position. What are the risks if the Egyptian people don’t feel that America is supportive of their struggle?
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The tragedy of a dictatorship is that they so eviscerate their countries that, even after they are gone, it’s hard for people to pick up the pieces and move forward. But I am hopeful in seeing the banner of the pre-Qaddafi monarchy rooted in the Sufi orders that led the resistance to colonialism.
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What the anxious West has failed to recognize in the Arab Spring is that the political transformations of the Middle East are the coming of age of a new Islamism.
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According to Professor Marc Ellis, a critic of Israel and the American Jewish establishment, Baylor University’s new president Ken Starr is seeking to replace him with “a right-wing, Israel-loving Jew that would cement [Starr’s] reputation with the right wing…”
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