Category: Daily

Religion & Media Current Events

A Very Perry Christmas

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Ashley Baxstrom:  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Christmas tree lots sprouting up like weeds, Christmas lights hung on trees in every wannabe-hip-neighborhood in the five boroughs, a whole new set of Christmas displays in the Macy’s windows. And of course, the turtledove on top:  pundits and politicians decrying the “War on Christmas.” There may not be snow on the ground (the rolling Texas farmland ground), but there are Kay Jewelers commercials on the air, which means the culture wars – like poinsettias and gingerbread lattes – must be back in season.  Today Gov. Perry released a brand new campaign ad, keeping pace with the other GOP candidates and the changing season.

“I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a Christian,” Perry says. “But you don’t need to be in the pews every Sunday to know that there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”  (Really, if you didn’t watch it before, just – just watch it. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the voice of the Ghost of a Certain Texas President Past.)

Perry promises (drawls) that if he’s elected he’ll stop “Obama’s war on religion” and will fight against “liberal attacks on our religious heritage.” Continue Reading →

After the Referendum:Sudan Negotiates National and Religious Identity in the North

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By Alex Thurston

The secession of South Sudan in July 2011 posed an existential question for (North) Sudan: what will be the political and cultural basis of the nation, which is in some ways a new country itself?

In December 2010, shortly before the referendum on Southern secession, President Omar al Bashir gave his answer:

“We’ll change the Constitution,” he said in a televised speech. “Shariah and Islam will be the main source for the Constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language.”

Bashir reiterated this promise in October, adding, “Ninety eight percent of the people are Muslims and the new constitution will reflect this.”

Bashir’s call for a consolidation of the state’s Arab-Islamic identity is calculated to appeal to the base of Islamists who brought him to power in 1989, many of whom continue to support the ruling National Congress Party (NCP). But it sits poorly with a number of groups in the new Sudan, including many Muslims. Efforts to use Islam as the basis of political power have a long history in Sudan, but past attempts to impose Bashir’s brand of political Islam have also hit major resistance. The many forces opposed to his regime have their own ideas about the country’s future. Continue Reading →

Catholic Attitude

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My mail item of the week award goes to New Oxford Review, based in Berkeley California, for their stunning subscription mailer.  The oversized envelope shows a 6 inch image of a Catholic Crusader, circa, well, the Crusades.  To his right is the one inch, all capital letters, “CATHOLIC ATTITUDE.”  I’ve got it pasted to my office door!  Here’s an excerpt from the four page letter:

The Catholic revolution, like Lenin’s and Castro’s revolutions, has been a monumental flop.  Of course, the pompous poo-bahs and radical apparatchiks who have taken hold of our parish councils, diocesan bureaucracies, and national publications refuse to recognize the obvious–they think the ’60s never ended.  Still trying to be cool cats, they’re so cool they’re frozen in a time warp.

Mercifully, God’s frozen people are thawing out.  Where’s the fire and dynamism in the Church today?  Among orthodox Catholics!

Continue Reading →

Daily Links: Don't Call It a Comeback

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Media in the West love the narrative that godless, Communist Russia eventually fell to the relentless, holy hand of capitalism (to be specific, the one at the end of Ronald Reagan’s right arm).  Now that communism is gone, lookee there!  Russians are flocking to view Our Lady’s Belt.

Visitors are required, because of the outrageously long lines, to wait an average of 26 hours to see the “cincture” of the Virgin Mary, on display thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Perhaps a sign that communism is gone: it is reported by impatient visitors that a separate line exists for VIPs.  And then there’s the marketing.  RT writes:

Ironically, a tiny piece of the same holy belt is on permanent display at another Moscow cathedral, just a few hundred meters away from Christ the Savior.

Perhaps a sign that communism is not forgotten: the church had to adjust the display of the belt to more swiftly move visitors by it.  Their new flow of veneration sounds like the one used in Lenin’s tomb: keep the worshipers in order and shuffle them efficiently past the relic.

New York Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the Securities and Exchange Commission not spare the rod with Citigroup.

From Fox News, a lengthy story on Al-Qaida’s impersonation of Christian missionaries in Africa.  So last century!

Kamran Pasha at Illume reminds us that women have been playing dominant roles in Islam for a long time. Continue Reading →

Daily Links: Don’t Call It a Comeback

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Media in the West love the narrative that godless, Communist Russia eventually fell to the relentless, holy hand of capitalism (to be specific, the one at the end of Ronald Reagan’s right arm).  Now that communism is gone, lookee there!  Russians are flocking to view Our Lady’s Belt.

Visitors are required, because of the outrageously long lines, to wait an average of 26 hours to see the “cincture” of the Virgin Mary, on display thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Perhaps a sign that communism is gone: it is reported by impatient visitors that a separate line exists for VIPs.  And then there’s the marketing.  RT writes:

Ironically, a tiny piece of the same holy belt is on permanent display at another Moscow cathedral, just a few hundred meters away from Christ the Savior.

Perhaps a sign that communism is not forgotten: the church had to adjust the display of the belt to more swiftly move visitors by it.  Their new flow of veneration sounds like the one used in Lenin’s tomb: keep the worshipers in order and shuffle them efficiently past the relic.

New York Judge Jed S. Rakoff told the Securities and Exchange Commission not spare the rod with Citigroup.

From Fox News, a lengthy story on Al-Qaida’s impersonation of Christian missionaries in Africa.  So last century!

Kamran Pasha at Illume reminds us that women have been playing dominant roles in Islam for a long time. Continue Reading →

Taking Tocqueville and Darwin for a Ride

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By Nathan Schradle

If something like a “Global Civil Society” ever becomes a reality (I’m picturing a giant face made of thousands of tiny robots, like in the Matrix Revolutions… only hopefully slightly less hell-bent on the destruction of the human species), it may want to give a huge shout-out to the year 1831. For starters, it’s the year that our very own New York University was founded, a university that recently played host to the dialogues that bear its name. Furthermore, as those who attended the third of the “NYU Dialogues on the Global Civil Society” can attest, the most recent speaker asserted that the stakes of such a conversation were first made plain in the very same year.

On October 31st, 2011, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks delivered his lecture, “The Great Partnership: Religion and the Moral Sense?” to a remarkably enthusiastic audience (when a group of about 15 students is lined up outside before the doors even open, “enthusiastic” might be an understatement). In an attempt to describe the role he sees religion playing in any “global civil society,” Lord Sacks pointed to two journeys that began in the year in question, specifically Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard the HMS Beagle and Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey to America. Sacks drew some eloquent parallels between the two trips, in which he established a set of binaries that constituted the crux of his argument: competition and cooperation, aggression and altruism, markets/politics and religion. Continue Reading →

For Liberals: An Academic Candy Coating for theBitter Pill of God

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Amy Levin:  Those who find religion scholars to be an insular grouping of armchair academics out of touch with the “real world” (a term said scholars enjoy deconstructing), might have been surprised to hear some of the panels at this year’s American Academy of Religion (AAR) Conference in San Francisco. Though the conference followed suit from previous years in its diversity of religions, ideas, and (inter)disciplines, many of the discussions trended towards a mix of religion, politics, the public sphere, democracy, grassroots organizing, peacebuilding, and secularism. You know, the “real stuff.”

Lisa Miller, an editor at Newsweek and keeper of the weekly Belief Watch column, taps into the academic space of public politics in this week’s column, “Is the black church the answer to liberal prayers?” She opens the conversation with the following: “As the American left continues to seek a coherent way to articulate its moral priorities in these days of political stalemates and widening income gaps, it might look to the most unlikely of places — the academy — for guidance and inspiration.” While I would hesitate to suggest that the “American left” and “the academy” have been in a long distance relationship up until now, Miller’s point is well taken. Continue Reading →

One Verse at a Time

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Ashley Baxstrom: There are trending topics, and then there are trending topics. Like the kind that will last 86 years rather than a week. Bonus staying power if they’re holy!

Beliefnet reported a project called “#TweetTheBible,” started by some guy named Anthony J. Thompson and his friends, who basically joked that St. Paul would totally have used Twitter to get out the Good News (all the News that’s fit to tweet, which, well we can do that!) In fact Thompson, a 30-year-old web developer, says he “has always felt called to use technology to edify the global Christian community.”

The result of his calling is @TweetTheBible86 (with a Facebook counterpart), which launched at 11:11 am on November 11 (11/11/11, 11:11 am) with the first verse of Genesis (so that’s 1-1:1?): “Genesis 1:1, In the beginning, God create the heavens and the earth. ..” Continue Reading →

Merry Christmas to Me!

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Mary Valle:  All I really want for Christmas is to watch “The Exorcist” with Fr. Gabriele Amorth.  I also want to thank him profusely for pointing out a few things that actually are kind of true. Who hasn’t been in a yoga class and “breathing” into some pose and thought “This shit is EVIL!” I know I sure have. Yoga is great, don’t get me wrong. But come on. It’s kinda evil. Who expected us to get into stretch-jersey bellbottoms and point our asses skyward in public en masse, before our current era? Excuse me, the current year of Our Lord? Yoga is optional, you might say. Is it, now. Is it really? Uh-huh. Didn’t think so. “Try doing it in a cassock!” said Fr. Amorth, in an interview I didn’t have with him. “That **** is *****.”

And Harry Potter! As someone who has listened to the entire series and is now making her way through the movies with a younger associate, it’s kinda evil too. Not Harry, of course. But Voldemort and all his friends and associates. Evil as they come, Fr. Armorth. In fact, Valdemort is so evil a lot of the characters won’t even say his name. Take that, Satan/Lucifer/Beezebub/etc.! Where do you stand on Twilight, sir? I think you might find it is also….evil, if you don’t like magical powers or supernatural creatures or immortal stalkers who prey on teenage girls. Oh wait. Continue Reading →