In the News: Profiling, Prince, Peaceniks and more!
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
a review of religion and media
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
Suzanne Schneider asks new and important questions about the life and work of Muhammad Asad. Continue Reading →
The Last Twentieth Century Book Club, is an ongoing monthly column exploring religious ephemera by Don Jolly . Continue Reading →
A round-up of recent religion & media news. Continue Reading →
By Joe McKnight One name kept repeating itself: Iyad ag-Ghali, leader of Ansar Dine. It seems to me his story, and his political role, may be one that ends up profoundly altering Mali’s future. Continue Reading →
A Q&A with biographer Deborah Baker, author of The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, released last month by Greywolf Press.
by Ashley Baxstrom
When biographer Deborah Baker came across a collection of letters at the New York Public Library, she opened a window into a particularly complex life. The letters told the story of Margaret Marcus, a Jewish woman raised in post-World War II upstate New York. Peggy, as she was known to her family, lived in search of community.
Marcus was a “social misfit” with a passion for National Geographic articles who found distressing the Israeli treatment of Arabs. She painted and wrote but couldn’t hold a job. Her parents sent her to a psychiatrist and, for a time, a mental institution. She exchanged letters with a noted Pakistani Muslim intellectual, Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, who would become a leader of the radical political Islamic group Jamaat al-Islamiyya. In 1961, under Mawdudi’s tutelage, Peggy, then 27, converted to Islam, changing her name to Maryam Marcus. Then she packed her possessions and moved to Lahore to live as a guest of her mentor.
Maryam’s writings on Islam have been widely read in conservative Muslim circles, and may have played a role in the rise of militant jihad over the past half-century. As narrated in The Convert, just as interesting, however, is Maryam’s personal life – particularly as we, and Baker, come to realize that she may not have been as honest, or perhaps even as sane, as we first thought. Continue Reading →
Oh dear. It comes around every year. The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, given four months after the Battle of Gettysburg by President Abraham Lincoln; proof that the Republican, influenced for much of his life by Enlightenment ideas, finally, while standing on the death-place of 50,000 soldiers, gave it over to “orthodox Christianity.” Continue Reading →
Oh dear. It comes around every year. The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, given four months after the Battle of Gettysburg by President Abraham Lincoln; proof that the Republican, influenced for much of his life by Enlightenment ideas, finally, while standing on the death-place of 50,000 soldiers, gave it over to “orthodox Christianity.” Continue Reading →
Oh dear. It comes around every year. The anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, given four months after the Battle of Gettysburg by President Abraham Lincoln; proof that the Republican, influenced for much of his life by Enlightenment ideas, finally, while standing on the death-place of 50,000 soldiers, gave it over to “orthodox Christianity.” Continue Reading →
At the end of a brief post yesterday about failure of bishops to solve the potential schism that ordination of women may cause in the Anglican communion, Joanna Brooks asks this question: “Will diverging perspectives on gender and sexuality determine the shape of the 21st-century Christian world?”
It’s a question that only begs more: Does sweeping change cause schism or does incremental change cause it as well? Why would the divide last the next 90 years? How would a shift of Anglican-Catholics to Vatican loyalty change the Catholic Church? The Anglican Church? What will all this church resistance to cultural change mean for equality in the future?
For more on the issue, read “The Church of England’s War Within Over Women Bishops” by ; “Vatican to Equate Women’s Ordination with Priest’s Pedophilia” by Mary E. Hunt; “Jeffrey John and the Global Anglican Schism: A Potted History”. Continue Reading →