islam

Breivik’s racism is different from others that came before. It’s belonging to a generic European Christianity that makes you good, and your opposition to Islam that makes you smart.

As scholar Scott Kugle knows well, to be both Muslim and gay means the possibility of having to “come out twice”—with the likely chance of encountering either homophobia or Islamophobia (or both), depending on the context.

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.

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

Whether we like it or not, Islam has become an indelible part of the culture and consciousness of 9/11. Ironically, the questions I regularly encounter have not actually changed much over the last ten years: Who was Muhammad, was he violent? What is Jihad? Why the scarves?

Assuming religious politics will play a significant role in the new government after the elections, will it be radical, moderate, or just the familiar gridlock experienced by most democracies?

Why you can’t trust a guy writing about religion who doesn’t understand religion.

The media discussion of the American soldier responsible reveals a journalistic double standard.

A new book of popular history provides an exhaustive and detailed history of the brutal yet bureaucratic Inquisition, arguing that it helps explain what the world is today.

The enemy of my enemy is… my enemy too?