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The Bush administration has widely been assumed to have significantly favored evangelical Christian perspectives and organizations in its policies. A corollary of that assumption has been that regime change would return us to our natural secular condition. Preliminary evidence suggests that the first is indeed the case (although the changes had been initiated during the Clinton administration) and that the second is unlikely.[...]
Art RemillardI have wondered for some time what Robert Bellah might think of President Obama's civil religious tone. Alas I have an answer. A segment of his "This is Our Moment, This is Our Time," from The Immanent Frame:
There is another element in Obama’s thinking that needs comment: his concern for America and its historical promise. It has been hard for his opponents to call Obama unpatriotic when he speaks so glowingly of our nation and its heritage. It is the eloquence with which he did that in his keynote address in 2004 that first told me that a remarkable new presence had arrived on the American scene. But what Obama has stressed is the promise of America, one that is still unfulfilled. It is our task as he has so often said to help create a more perfect union because this one is so imperfect. Obama has rejected the idea that supporting the Iraq War is a measure of patriotism. He has said, in effect, that the true patriot will oppose such a war.
Already in 2004 this reminded me of what I wrote in my most frequently reprinted article, “Civil Religion in America,” which was a call to see that the best of our tradition required opposition to the Vietnam War, not support of it. Too many have read that article as describing American civil religion as “integrating,” or “Durkheimian,” in a way that doesn’t appreciate the radicalism of Durkheim. Some friends who do understand what I had written in 1966 told me they thought Obama had read it. I have no reason to think he has. He doesn’t need me to see that the promise is the core we must celebrate, not the often desperately disappointing reality, which he notes when he promises to close Guantanamo and renounce torture as American policy. That one can see America as a beacon of hope, even, in Lincoln’s words, as “the last best hope of earth,” while also recognizing that America has committed the gravest of crimes from the colonial period to the present, seems to escape critics from the left and the right. Obama would never speak like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but he knows, as any serious American knows, that Jeremiah Wright was telling the truth, even if not the whole truth, and that denial of the terrible side of our history is no more healthy for us than it would be for Germany or Japan.
Two years ago, I struggled to write an article describing the horrors of Israel’s unsuccessful invasion of Lebanon which resulted in a thousand people dead, mostly civilians. How, I wondered naively, could the world sit back and allow this to occur? Two years previously, I had asked the same question when Israel invaded Jenin and then Rafah. The UN Human Rights Commission had condemned Israel for the “mass killings” of Palestinians and for “gross violations” of humanitarian law in Jenin. Amnesty International declared that Israel’s actions in Rafah constituted “a form of collective punishment.” Condemnation by human rights organisations is not something new to Israel. In 2000, the UN Human Rights Commission found Israel guilty of “systematic killing of civilians and children”, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”. With a bitter twist of irony, a “crime against humanity” is what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people and from where the concept originates.
(BBC, January 12, 2009)
Paris, France - Two petrol bombs have been thrown at a synagogue north of Paris, police have said, days after another French synagogue was attacked.
Several Religious Right groups have demonstrations planned for Inauguration Day; others are busy selling product and raising cash for the...
By Tahl Raz
In this continuing drama of ambition, social class, and
greed we are confronted daily with the sad victims, loathsome characters and
resented symbols of excess marking the rise and fall of our Wall Street-led
culture.
Bernie Madoff's victims are only now overcoming their shame
to step forward and tell their story or plead for help. This excerpt comes from an email that is making
the rounds:
Dear Friends,
Now that it has been a few weeks and time has past,
many more of you have ...
I have pair of articles over at Religion Dispatches today that report some of the revelations from a new book...
("San Francisco Chronical", January 6, 2009)
San Francisco, USA - Parishioners of the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood plan to arrive early for morning Mass today so they can paint over walls that were scrawled with swastikas and other graffiti.
Reconciliation assumes that hostilities have ended, that it is time to heal wounds and unite enemies. Such moments are sacred. But not every moment is like this. When something bad is going on, merely to accept it is craven. Attempting to justify it is worse. But refusing to understand it is monumentally stupid. I am writing at the moment of the Gaza bombings. My heart is cradling its grief, remembering its visit to that desolate place (on an Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation) in 1998. At that time, the Jews in our party dared not remark above a whisper what the passage inward reminded them of: some thoughts are forbidden. These days I recall 19th century Indian reservations, the Trail of Tears. It seemed then that things could scarcely get worse. But they have, they have. Hope depends on the notion that there is a bottom you can touch, a point at which the cycle must begin to reverse. But Israel/Palestine seems sometimes an infinite descent into Hell.
By Usama Redha and Kimi Yoshino ("Los Angeles Times", January 5, 2009)
Baghdad, Iraq - As Shiite Muslim pilgrims made their way to a shrine in Baghdad on Sunday to mark one of the sect's most important holidays, a female suicide bomber detonated her explosives at a crowded checkpoint, killing as many as 38 people and wounding 72, police said.
Last month
the Asian-Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW) published Surfacing, a compilation of the papers presented
at the 4th Asia-Pacific Conference on Reproductive Sexual Health and
Rights (APCRSH) in Hyderabad last year. Surfacing discusses
the impact of Roman Catholic, Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism on sexual
and reproductive health and rights in a number of countries in the region.
In many respects, the publication attempts to address the challenges
of religious fundamentalism, whilst encouraging a more rights-based
and gendered approach to practicing religion.
Of particular
interest is Zaitun Mohamed Kasim's contribution on Islamic fundamentalism. His contribution raises many concerning examples of how the differing interpretations
of Islamic jurisprudence bear upon a range of reproductive health issues
in Malaysia and Indonesia, two Muslim-Dominant countries in Southeast
Asia, where 60.4 and 86.1 percent of the population respectively
are Islamic. With no central doctrinal authority, fatwahs (religious edicts) serve as the "bridge"
between Islamic principles and modern life. With thousands of fatwahs
issued every month in Islamic countries around the globe, even religious
and political leaders in the Muslim world admit that the number is excessive, causing confusion and potentially
reflecting ideology more than learning.
This divergence
in Islamic thought is reflected in the varying levels of acknowledgment
and acceptance of abortion. In most Muslim-majority countries, abortion
is generally prohibited with exceptions usually made where the health
of the mother is at risk. Malaysia's Abortion
Act 1967
makes termination of pregnancy illegal, with minor exceptions. A pregnancy
may be terminated if two registered medical practitioners are of the
opinion, formed in good faith, that continuation of the pregnancy will
endanger the mother's life. Termination of pregnancy is also advised
to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical and mental health
of the mother. ARROW reports that many service providers
and members of the public in Malaysia do not know the legal exceptions
for abortion, partly due a lack of accurate information and partly because
of the low priority accorded by the government to promoting women's
reproductive rights. Dr
Choong Sim Poey of the Reproductive Rights
Advocacy Alliance
in Malaysia similarly suggests that whilst abortion services are "widely
available" in the private sector, information about public
sector abortion services is "hush-hush," with the Ministry of Health refusing to provide abortion services in public
hospitals based on the interpretation of the penal code.
The Indonesian
abortion law is based on a national health bill passed in 1992 that
has been criticized for its vagueness. The law is generally interpreted as allowing
abortion only if the woman provides confirmation from a doctor that
her pregnancy is life-threatening, a letter of consent from her husband
or a family member, a positive pregnancy test result and a statement
guaranteeing that she will practice contraception afterwards. Like in
Malaysia, Maria
Ufar Ansor, head
of the women's section of Indonesia's biggest Islamic Organisation,
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), has stated that dangerous abortion techniques
are not uncommon, with the Guttmacher
Institute reporting
two million induced abortions in Indonesia every year.
The study conducted
by the Guttmacher
Institute is particularly
interesting for its survey of the attitude to abortion of 105 Muslim,
Catholic and other Christian religious leaders in Indonesia. This survey
revealed that 82% of the leaders surveyed agreed that abortion is acceptable
if a woman's life is in danger, many reasoning that a woman's life
should be prioritized over that of the fetus because a woman "is needed
to look after the children and family she already has." The survey
also concluded that Muslim leaders, though conservative, were more tolerant
of abortion than their Christian counterparts, with a higher proportion
of Muslim than Christian leaders supporting abortion if the pregnancy
would interfere with a woman's schooling or impact her psychological
health.
Importantly,
however, the Guttmacher report notes the differences in what is considered
an acceptable gestational period according to sect. Followers of Imam
Hanafi generally consider an abortion acceptable up to 120 days after
conception. However, followers of Syafi'i consider abortion acceptable
only within 40 days of conception. Indonesian Matters,
an Indonesian website on the theme of culture and Islamization, refers
to the head of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI), Indonesia's Clerics'
Council, Ma'ruf
Amin, who espouses
that the book recalling the words and deeds of Muhammad "says that
at the fortieth day of pregnancy the unborn child receives its soul
or spirit, and hence abortion after this time is forbidden." For this
reason, back in 2004, when 13 Indonesian Muslim scholars
proposed that an exception should be created for pregnancy resulting
from rape or incest, the MUI rejected the proposal, responding that
such an exception would amount to the taking of a life, jinayah
or murder.
Interpretations
of what is haram (prohibited) or halal
(permitted) in Islam similarly impact contraceptive use, attitudes towards
family planning services for unmarried couples and people living with
HIV/AIDS, which I will discuss in a future posting. Yet, the impact
on abortion alone is sufficient to highlight the potential gravity of
restrictive interpretations of Islamic tenets, with the World Health Organization reporting that in 2000 unsafe abortion
accounted for 19 percent of maternal deaths in Southeast Asia. At the
same time, the differences in the abortion laws in the two countries
as well as the divergence of opinion within the Islamic religion itself,
remind us about the necessity to distinguish between religion and religious
fundamentalism. What we see here is the interpretation and application
of religious principles in a way that encroaches on reproductive freedoms
at the cost of women's lives.
By Michael Weiss
I have already tried to show how Hamas has failed the people of Palestine politically, and how even the most optimistic appraisal of the organization's supposed "pragmatism" has failed to pan out, even under exigent circumstances in which pragmatism should surely trump ideological purity. However, lest one come away with the narrow assumption that Hamas's theocratic fascism represents a direct long-term threat only to Jews, I invite you to consider the following speech made by Ahmad ...
There is an effort underway by Rev. Michael Bray, a convicted terrorist and a leader of the underground Army of...
By Bob Drogin (The Los Angeles Times", December 7, 2008)
Takoma Park, USA - To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes.
(BBC, December 9, 2008)
London, UK - A trial version of the first virtual world aimed at the Muslim community has been launched.
And Oxford Americanize your ears.
By Jeff Sharlet
Every year I plug the annual Oxford American Southern Music Issue here on The Revealer because A) I love it; B) I usually have a piece in it, which is independent of me loving the only music magazine that always cares as much about the words on the page as the notes in the song. Editor Marc Smirnoff created the first Southern Music issue ten years ago as the anti-Rolling Stone. What that meant to Smirnoff was “music writing that tried, perhaps foolishly, to tap into the cosmos, much as the music we love does.” Tap into the cosmos? That sounds like some kind of religion. Feels like it, too—the only religious writing I’ve ever done, I think (as opposed to writing about religion)—was about music, and most of it was for Oxford American. In fact, editor-at-large Paul Reyes—a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to the South as Motown is to the Midwestern sensibility—first recruited me after he read something I’d written about religion. He asked me to write about Al Green, once the sexiest man who ever sang bare-chested, now besuited and addressed as “Reverend.” This year, I got Dock Boggs, who pawned his banjo and spent thirty years hiding out from his music in church until it finally caught up with him and took him to his grave.
“It’s not altogether surprising,” writes Peter Guralnick in his cover story on Jerry Lee Lewis for this year’s double-CD, 10th anniversary special music edition, “that Jerry Lee Lewis’ art should ultimately rest on the same act that he has carried on his whole life, the same one on which so many other prodigious artists from John Donne to Little Richard have been suspended: a teetering balance between the sacred and the profane. Clearly the music of the church was a source of inspiration to him: it is at the heart of rock & roll.”
It’s there in the blues, too, and jazz, in country by the bucketful, rounding out hip hop, all over soul, the blood of R&B. It was Pythagoras who figured it all out, according to Van Dyke Parks, the master musician who contributes a foreword to Oxford American’s giant new Book of Great Music Writing: “How we could sing to the Gods and each other by codifying the modes. Some modes were rosy (‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ Ionian). Some were blue (‘My Yiddishe Mama,” Aeolian, now the modified Hungarian minor’).” And some are simply cosmic, not for the Gods or us, but by self-declared gods, such as Sun Ra’s “Travel the Spaceways,” from Oxford American’s 2006 sampler, or “Heat,” by Betty White, who with her 30-years-younger partner Elton reinvented herself in old age as a near-naked goddess of sex singing, replicating as purely as she was capable of – metaphorically, that is – the essence of orgasmic true love. “They were so horny,” writes novelist Kevin Brockmeier of Betty and Elton, the hedonistic saints of the Little Rock of his youth, “and they were so beautiful, and you never know if somebody is falling.”
That last phrase means something deep about Betty and Elton, and sex and love and probably religion, too, but you’ll have to tune in to find out. (That means buying it – the magazine’s accountant embezzled $100 k, and now they need to make some money.) There’s a lot of religion in this issue and on the two CDs that come with it, from Jerry Lee’s tightrope to the demons of Dock Boggs, a country blues singer from the 1920s whose music was so dark his songs would cast a shadow in a coal mine; from those who left religion for the rewards of soul, such as The “5” Royales (“The Slummer the Slum,” 1958) to those who never felt like they had to choose, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (“Rock Me,” 1941). If you know who these artists are, you need this magazine for the stories by writers such as Greil Marcus, Ron Carlson, Clyde Edgerton, and Patricia Spears Jones; if your first response to names such as Furry Lewis, Snookum Russell, The Insect Trust, Cousin Emmy, and Love… With Arthur Lee is “Who?” you need it first for the CDs, a guided tour through the spaceways of forgotten (or never really known) Southern sounds. “Everybody—believers in the Book of Revelation, the elderly, atheist Jews—is welcome to come,” as Mike Powell writes here of Sacred Harp singing. “No experience necessary, with singing or God.”
The anticipation was nearly overwhelming. The trip had been exhausting, the waits in various airport terminals long, the chaos of the throngs of pilgrims diffuse. Finally, however, we boarded our buses and headed for the city in which our Prophet (peace be upon him) was born and where the Message began. The road to Mecca was tan, dusty, and desert through and through. I could not help but be overcome with fatigue and sleep, despite my discomfort for being so "naked" in my ihram [the loose white garment worn by all male pilgrims]. Yet, what kept me going was the knowledge that, soon, I was to come face to face with God's House that Abraham (pbuh) built. Soon, Mecca approached, and I was simultaneously surprised and disappointed. Mecca looked like any other ancient Middle Eastern city, with its packed shops, small, dusty streets, and narrow alleyways. Somehow, I expected the city of the Prophet's birth to be impeccably maintained and sparkling throughout. How else should his city be treated?
The recent terror attacks on Bombay/Mumbai, for which there can be no justification whatsoever, have targetted railway stations, restaurants, hospitals, places of worship, streets and hotels. These are the places in which people gather. where the anonymous flux of urban life finds refuge and sustenance on an everyday basis. By attacking such sites, the tactics of the recent terror attack (like all its predecessors) echo the tropes of conventional warfare as it developed in the twentieth century. These tactics valued the objective of the escalation of terror and panic amongst civilians higher than they viewed the neutralization of strictly military or strategic targets. In a war without end, (which is one way of looking at the twentieth century and its legacy) panic is the key weapon and the most important objective.
By Jacqueline L. Salmon and Michelle Boorstein ("Washington Post", November 22, 2008)
Washington, USA - There have been letters, discreet inquiries and bold appeals. Some are using their connections; others are just seeking a foot in the door.
(AP, November 22, 2008)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- Malaysia's top Islamic body on Saturday ruled against Muslims practicing yoga, saying it had elements of other religions that could corrupt Muslims.
(BBC, November 22, 2008)
New Delhi, India - Tibetan exiles meeting in India have agreed to back the Dalai Lama's policy of seeking autonomy, rather than full independence, from China.