Tag: democracy

Democracy and Faith

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From Jan-Werner Müller’s article in the November/December Boston Review titled, “Making Muslim Democracies”:

In the case of Christian Democracy, believers needed to be convinced that the party had not sold out to secularism (of which liberal democracy seemed merely one symptom); nonbelievers needed assurance that religiously inspired parties would not abandon state neutrality in religious affairs once in power, and that the pronouncements of a Maritain did not constitute a kind of “double discourse,” with different messages for believers and nonbelievers. It was a delicate balancing act. Maritain managed it, partly because the rather vague philosophy of personalism suggested a third path not only between individualism and communism, but also between religion and secularism.

Thus did Christian Democrats create a unique set of principles that both believers and nonbelievers could follow. The moderation of Christian Democracy was not just the result of day-to-day politics. Rather, a long-term process of scholarship and debate helped create a group of parties that appealed to voters not by being arbitrarily centrist, but by making widely agreeable proposals based on Christian values. Continue Reading →

The Strange Moves of The Economist

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By Jeff Sharlet

The reverence with which so many upper-middle class Americans read The Economist has always puzzled me. There’s much to admire about the magazine, but it generally performs the same function as Newsweek, boiling down events into centrist conventional wisdom, facts be damned. A report in the July 3, 2010 issue, “The religious right in east Africa: Slain by the spirit,” is a case in point. I’ve been reporting on the religious right anti-gay movement in Uganda from here in the U.S. and from Kampala for nine months now, so I’m in a good position to see The Economist’s strange moves; I wonder what I’d make of the article that follows it, on Somaliland’s elections, if I were as informed on that story. But one needn’t have expertise to debunk The Economist’s report; a Google search would do it, especially if you landed, as you likely would, on the well-documented blogs of gay activist Jim Burroway or evangelical scholar Warren Throckmorton.

The biggest error is The Economist’s declaration that the bill no longer calls for the death penalty. That’s propaganda put out by the bill’s defenders. In fact, as I learned by asking the bill’s author, Ugandan Member of Parliament David Bahati, it does. (I’ll be publishing those interviews in my forthcoming book, C Street.) Bahati acknowledges that the death penalty may drop out of the final version; but it hasn’t yet, and it’s dangerous for The Economist to say as much. Continue Reading →

Learning from Iraq's Struggle for Religious Tolerance

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Three months after elections in Iraq, a new Prime Minister has not yet been selected to form a new government. Accusations of fraud still surround the election and Ayad Allawi’s secular (but Sunni-dominated) coalition is struggling against the Shiite opposition, led by Nouri al Maliki, to keep a grip on its narrow margin of victory.  Many continue to call for a vote recount.  Optimists have noted that the political wrangling has at least not devolved into violence. Continue Reading →

Learning from Iraq’s Struggle for Religious Tolerance

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Three months after elections in Iraq, a new Prime Minister has not yet been selected to form a new government. Accusations of fraud still surround the election and Ayad Allawi’s secular (but Sunni-dominated) coalition is struggling against the Shiite opposition, led by Nouri al Maliki, to keep a grip on its narrow margin of victory.  Many continue to call for a vote recount.  Optimists have noted that the political wrangling has at least not devolved into violence. Continue Reading →

Learning from Iraq’s Struggle for Religious Tolerance

Posted on by

Three months after elections in Iraq, a new Prime Minister has not yet been selected to form a new government. Accusations of fraud still surround the election and Ayad Allawi’s secular (but Sunni-dominated) coalition is struggling against the Shiite opposition, led by Nouri al Maliki, to keep a grip on its narrow margin of victory.  Many continue to call for a vote recount.  Optimists have noted that the political wrangling has at least not devolved into violence. Continue Reading →

Faith and Trust

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The nomination of Elana Kagan to the Supreme Court has a few progressive commentators rightly chattering over the cartes blanches the Obama administration is receiving. Glenn Greenwald at Salon provides the most cogent summation of the illogic:

Just think about what that means. If the choice is Kagan, you’ll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence: “I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it’s quite possible she’ll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice.” In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama’s choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it’s Obama choice. Isn’t that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism?

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