Religion Dispatches
John Hick, a celebrated theologian and philosopher who died earlier this year, was drawn to issues that transcend any particular tradition—the question of evil, the meaning of suffering, life after death, and religious diversity.
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A state that attempts to use the force of law to stop blasphemy must select certain identities for protection to the exclusion of others.
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The Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell, who sees the integration of Muslims in Europe as troublesome, reviews two new books that see the integration of Muslims in Europe as troublesome.
Read MoreWired reveals stunning details of military leadership training course.
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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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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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I, like many others, have found myself unable to turn away from the Arab revolutions. As a strong believer in the egalitarian nature of the Muslim religion, and a fervent critic of common assumptions that are held about Arabs and Muslims, these revelations were a welcome confirmation of my…
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Along comes Jersey Shore with its cast of self-described Italians. These are not the magical white folks of world-conquering, democracy-building myth-but they’re still “white”. They behave like the Museum assumes only people of my color behaved. The sum total of their television life is a kind of late-capitalist tragic anthropology: doing laundry to go to parties, in order to have sex. For me, it’s been tremendously liberating to know that people of my color and faith are not the only people who are embarrassing to watch on television.
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A consciousness change is happening in Syria, a country of twenty-three million that has been brutalized under Martial Law since 1963. My parents left in 1971 with their children, including me, because the repression of civil liberties had already become intolerable. The sense of helpless terror became so ingrained among Syrians that relatives who remained in Syria spoke only in hushed tones and coded words about the brutality of the state—even, incredibly, when they were visiting us in our suburban U.S. home, miles from the reach of any Syrian state police agent.
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