Yesterday the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia announced that the kingdom’s girls are, in the eyes of men and Allah, ready to marry at the age of 10 or 12. Rebuking those who called for the servitude marriage age to be raised, he noted that Islamic law doesn’t oppress women and cited the old ones as [...]
Tags:Egypt·Iran·Islam·Islamic apologetics·Karim Sadjadpour·Max Fisher·Middle East·Mona Eltahawy·Muslim·Pakistan·patriarchy·Saudi Arabia·sex·sexism·women·Zara Jamal
Over at The Medium and the Message, Adam Curtis is doing some of the best work on the web. His multimedia stories are part history and part journalism, spliced together with narrative that doubles as commentary. In his most recent piece, Adam explores the parallel lives of religious fundamentalists in American and Iran.
It is an [...]
Tags:American fundamentalism·Iranian fundamentalism·religious right·theocracy
Over at the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has weighed in with his review of Elaine Pagels’ newest book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations. In a previous post, I excerpted a lecture in which Pagels discusses the book and its themes. Gopnik’s review is a nice companion.
In keeping with a persistent [...]
Tags:Adam Gopnik·Christian mysticism·early Christianity·Elaine Pagels·Gnostic·Nicene·Revelations
In today’s news we learn that Saudi Arabia is on the one hand buying Western academic prestige and on the other beheading a woman accused of practicing “sorcery and witchcraft.”
The state-run Saudi news agency announced that a woman named Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar was publicly beheaded because she claimed to be a healer who could [...]
Tags:Allah·Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar·beheading·faith healing·Islam·King Saud University·Muslim·Neil Robertson·Saudi Arabia·sorcery·Wahhabi·witchcraft
While browsing at my local bookstore yesterday and looking for a diversionary read, I serendipitously discovered The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992) by Daniel Richter. Although I’m only halfway through, it seems to be the book for those interested in a comprehensive history [...]
Tags:Cayuga·competition·Daniel Richter·Deganawidah·evolutionary theists·Great League of Peace and Power·Hiawatha·intergroup·Iroquois·Mohawk·Oneida·Onondoga·prosocial·Seneca·The Ordeal of the Longhouse·warfare
Almost immediately after the German surrender in May 1945, people began trying to explain what had happened. The horrors of the Nazi regime were such that almost every explanation has been offered. The weakest of explanations is bewilderment. But Nazi depravity and German complicity is not inexplicable.
As the process of explication began to unfold, one [...]
Tags:anti-semitism·atheism·Coel Hellier·creationist·Darwinism·German Christianity·German theism·Hitler·materialist·Nazi religion·Nazism·race creation·racial ideology·special creation
Wondering whether this election will herald the coming of a presidential prophet, Harold Bloom is in rare form in this masterpiece of compression on Romney the Mormon. He hits all cylinders at the finish:
Mormonism’s best inheritance from Joseph Smith was his passion for education, hardly evident in the anti-intellectual and semi-literate Southern Baptist [...]
Tags:Harold Bloom·Joseph Smith·Mitt Romney·Mormon·Southern Baptist·theocracy
Review: Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere, by Craig Martin (Equinox Pub. 2010)
“Separation of church and state.”
It is revealing that this phrase, a shibboleth of sorts, means so many things to so many different people. In law, there are endless arguments over the extent to which government may entangle itself [...]
Tags:Christian hegemony·Craig Martin·Establishment Clause·First Amendment·Genealogy of Liberalism·John Locke·Martin Luther·Masking Hegemony·public-private·secular-religious·separation of church and state·wall of separation
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
With this famous sentence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterful critique of political power. Less well known is another sentence from The Social Contract (1762): “No State has ever been founded without Religion serving as its base.”
My reading of history is that Rousseau was right. State-formation [...]
Tags:China·civic religion·disciplina·divination·Dominique Briquel·Etruria·Etruscan·Etruscan books·haruspices·haruspicy·J.G. Frazer·Jean-Jacques Rousseau·magic·politics·power·prodigia·religion·Roman·Roman epistemology·Rome·Romulus·science·Shang Dynasty·state formation·Tages Against Jesus
The actor David Carradine may have led a troubled life but he experienced no such trouble as Kwai Chang Caine, a Buddhist monk on the move in the old American west. From 1972-1975, the Kung Fu series was must watch television for kids my age, even if we had no idea that Caine was a [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·axial age·Buddhism·China·Confucian·David Carradine·David Keightly·divination·Jamil Anderlini·kung fu·Kwai Chang Caine·legitimation·monastery·power·Shang Dynasty·Shaolin Temple·Shi Yongxin·Ti·Zen
