Browsed by
Category: Religion

Martin Buber’s vision of Zionism as a cultural rather than political movement

Martin Buber’s vision of Zionism as a cultural rather than political movement

Comments 0 Comment

Adam Kirsch writes: In 1917, when the Zionists were celebrating Britain’s endorsement of their aims in the Balfour Declaration, Buber objected that he did not envision the redemption of the Jews as something that could be achieved through political victories. Later, after Buber moved to Jerusalem, in 1938, he opposed a Jewish declaration of statehood, arguing that Palestine should become a binational state shared by Arabs and Jews. And, after the State of Israel came into being, in 1948, Buber…

Read More Read More

ISIS still has global reach despite the caliphate’s collapse

ISIS still has global reach despite the caliphate’s collapse

Comments 0 Comment

Robin Wright writes: Exactly a month after losing its final piece of territory, the Islamic State is giving notice that it can still surprise the world—this time in Sri Lanka. On Tuesday, it claimed responsibility for Easter bombings of three churches and three popular hotels which killed more than three hundred innocent civilians, including more than forty children, and injured another five hundred. “The perpetrators of the attack that targeted nationals of the coalition states and Christians in Sri Lanka…

Read More Read More

Sri Lanka’s pain is going to spread

Sri Lanka’s pain is going to spread

Comments 0 Comment

Mihir Sharma writes: In Sri Lanka, memories of war and terrorism are very much alive. The decades-long civil war between the Sinhala-dominated government in Colombo and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was brutal by any standards, and it ended a decade ago with a climactic battle near the Indian Ocean that took thousands of civilian lives. But Sri Lanka, beautiful and multicultural, has never had just the one fault line. On Easter morning, when hundreds of Christians and hotel…

Read More Read More

Steve Bannon ‘told Italy’s populist leader: Pope Francis is the enemy’

Steve Bannon ‘told Italy’s populist leader: Pope Francis is the enemy’

Comments 0 Comment

The Observer reports: Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon advised Italy’s interior minister Matteo Salvini to attack the pope over the issue of migration, according to sources close to the Italian far right. During a meeting in Washington in April 2016, Bannon – who would within a few months take up his role as head of Trump’s presidential campaign – suggested the leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party should start openly targeting Pope Francis, who has made the plight…

Read More Read More

Why giant statues of Hindu gods and leaders are making Muslims in India nervous

Why giant statues of Hindu gods and leaders are making Muslims in India nervous

Comments 0 Comment

By Indulata Prasad, Arizona State University Statues – big statues, the largest in the world – are being built all across India. Like many public monuments, they attempt to convey history in a concrete form. But India’s new statues convey something else, too: the power and vision of one dominant group – and the vulnerability of others. That’s because India’s biggest new public monuments all pay tribute to Hindu gods and leaders. As a scholar of social change in India,…

Read More Read More

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

Comments 0 Comment

Darren Byler writes: In mid-2017, Alim, a Uighur man in his 20s, returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe”. The police administered what they call a “health check”, which involved collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice recordings and face scans –…

Read More Read More

Bulldozing mosques: The latest tactic in China’s war against Uighur culture

Bulldozing mosques: The latest tactic in China’s war against Uighur culture

Comments 0 Comment

Rachel Harris writes: Ten years ago, I started researching Islam among the Uighurs. I spent my summers travelling around the Xinjiang region in western China. I took long bus journeys through the desert to Kashgar, Yarkand and Kucha, slept on brick beds in family homes in remote villages, stopped off at Sufi shrines, and visited many, many mosques. My husband was working with me, and we dragged our kids along for the ride. The kids were quite small and not…

Read More Read More

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soar in UK after Christchurch shootings

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soar in UK after Christchurch shootings

Comments 0 Comment

The Guardian reports: The number of anti-Muslim hate crimes reported across Britain increased by 593% in the week after a white supremacist terrorist killed worshippers at two New Zealand mosques, an independent monitoring group has said. The charity Tell Mama said almost all of the increase was caused by hate incidents linked to the New Zealand attacks last Friday, and there were more recorded in the last seven days than the week following the 2017 Islamist terrorist attack on Manchester….

Read More Read More

Pro-social religions didn’t kick-start complex social systems

Pro-social religions didn’t kick-start complex social systems

Comments 0 Comment

Scientific American reports: About 12,000 years ago human societies went big; tribes and villages grew into vast cities, kingdoms and empires within just a few millennia. For such large and complex societies to take root, people needed to maintain social cohesion and cooperation, even among complete strangers. What enabled this, many researchers have argued, was religion. Such a religion, the idea goes, would work particularly well if it established standards of morality and behavior—and enforced them with the threat of…

Read More Read More

Australians are asking how did we get here? Well, Islamophobia is practically enshrined as public policy

Australians are asking how did we get here? Well, Islamophobia is practically enshrined as public policy

Comments 0 Comment

Jason Wilson writes: In the period of the country’s enthusiastic participation in the War on Terror, Islam and Muslims have frequently been treated as public enemies, and hate speech against them has inexorably been normalised. Australian racism did not of course begin in 2001. The country was settled by means of a genocidal frontier war, and commenced its independent existence with the exclusion of non-white migrants. White nationalism was practically Australia’s founding doctrine. But a succession of events in the…

Read More Read More

What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world

What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world

Comments 0 Comment

Ross Andersen writes: Amid the human crush of Old Delhi, on the edge of a medieval bazaar, a red structure with cages on its roof rises three stories above the labyrinth of neon-lit stalls and narrow alleyways, its top floor emblazoned with two words: birds hospital. On a hot day last spring, I removed my shoes at the hospital’s entrance and walked up to the second-floor lobby, where a clerk in his late 20s was processing patients. An older woman…

Read More Read More

Young evangelicals speak out

Young evangelicals speak out

Comments 0 Comment

Alexandria Beightol (one of six young evangelicals featured in the New York Times) writes: I was pulled out of Smith College in 2015 when I told my parents that I was rethinking the legitimacy of anti-gay theology. I thought, “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.” I was Republican like them. Before, I supported whatever my church told me about candidates and issues. I never questioned or read outside…

Read More Read More

Muslim groups raise thousands for Pittsburgh synagogue shooting victims

Muslim groups raise thousands for Pittsburgh synagogue shooting victims

Comments 0 Comment

The New York Times reports: Two Muslim organizations have raised more than $130,000 to help victims and their families following the shooting massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday. The online fund-raiser was part of a broad outpouring of assistance in response to the anti-Semitic attack, which killed 11 people and left six others injured, including blood drives, vigils and a separate crowdfunding campaign that has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tarek El-Messidi, a Chicago-based…

Read More Read More

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting is a moment of reckoning for American Jews

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting is a moment of reckoning for American Jews

Comments 0 Comment

Jay Michaelson writes: After the 9/11 attacks, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said that countries now had to choose between fighting terror and abetting it, that there was no neutral ground. In his metaphor, you were either sitting in the smoking section, or the no-smoking section. In the wake of the worst attack on Jews in American history, all of us, but especially American Jews like me, face a similar decision. We either support Donald Trump and the movement of…

Read More Read More

Why the Tree of Life shooter was fixated on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Why the Tree of Life shooter was fixated on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

Comments 0 Comment

Masha Gessen writes: A couple of hours before opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Robert Bowers, the suspected gunman, posted on the social network Gab, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and Bowers had posted about it at least once before. Two and a half weeks earlier, he had linked to a HIAS…

Read More Read More

George Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island

George Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island

Comments 0 Comment

On August 18,1790, during his second year in office as America’s first president, George Washington wrote: If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and a happy people. The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a…

Read More Read More