The recent spate of mass killers all sought to solve their problems with a certain expression of gun violence that maps easily onto the masculinist roots of Christianity and other religious traditions—particularly in more conservative expressions.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter retells the story of America, laying the blame for many of the worst episodes on vampires. Does this history let us off the hook?
If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.
The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.
At the end of 2011, in a sign of what’s to come, the U.S. Bishops warned the Obama administration to amend a regulation on contraception in its health care legislation or stand accused of religious discrimination.
The inverse of the argument that Islam ‘causes’ terrorism is the idea that Islam could solve the problem. Either way, it’s undue focus on the religion.