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Is authentic religious commitment incompatible with critical thinking, reason, or compromise, as philosopher Simon Critchley seems to imply in a recent essay on Obama? Or is our challenge to refuse the false oppositions between total transformation and conflict, or politics and piety?

John Law was a murderer, a gambler, and an economic advisor to kings. What does his story, and the tale of the first great market panic, have to tell us about today’s financial crisis?

Barack Obama tried to run a color-blind campaign, and he won. But don’t believe the hype: an Obama victory doesn’t mean an end to racism in our culture, or that we should blithely forget the history of racial injustice.

RD News Round-Up: November 17, 2008: New surveys on the faith vote; Rev. Moon’s plans for the UN; Jews to Mormons: lay off the dead; plus Jill Stanek, Tom Minnery and Joel Hunter

In the midst of a global financial crisis one sector has yet to suffer the fate of the rest. Islamic finance, or Sharia-compliant banking, offers strict moral guidelines for dealing with money. Trading debt and risky speculation are off-limits, as is investment in immoral enterprises like gambling, prostitution, and war profiteering. It might be time to get the muftis on the phone.

According to Zen, ignorance is the grand-daddy of suffering. That some AIDS victims are “innocent” and some not is not only ignorant, but the antithesis of compassion.

Though many have already sought to draw comparisons between Mumbai and 9/11, the most striking thing about the horrific attacks in Mumbai is the local sense of place that that the terrorists tried to destroy.

As long as the world community chooses to focus primarily on military options, these attacks will continue. But there are other options if we are willing to talk.

Are the deaths of “our” people more important to us? What were two Brooklyn Jews doing in India anyway? Our columnist reflects on the selective sympathies of Westerners—of Jews in particular—upon hearing the news of the murder of an Orthodox rabbi and his wife during this Indian national tragedy.

Tom Daschle, a pro-choice and pro-stem cell Catholic, will serve as Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Though attacked in the past, he has a history of keeping church and state separate.