Americas

Conflating Religion and Race.

Source:The daily Beast. The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the […]

Can Interfaith Dialogue Cure Religious Violence?

religiondispatches: In the wake of the Boston Bombings, Eboo Patel, public intellectual and director of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), has proposed, in a recent article on HuffPo, that this explosive violence resulted partly from a failure of interfaith dialogue. With the caveat that “interfaith programs are not a miracle solution,” he […]

The Future of Faith

Huff Post: by Dianne Butler Bass. Over the last year, it has become increasingly clear that there are two significant cultural forces reshaping the religious future: 1) the rise of the “unaffiliateds,” including atheists, agnostics, humanists, “spiritual but not religious” and post-theists; and 2) the rise of religious pluralism and […]

The Arrogance of Ignoring Muslim Women

By Murtaza Hussain is a political commentator and contributing writer at Al-Jazeera,The Guardian and Salon. Source: NY Times What do Muslim women want? In striking scenes around the world, ostensibly well-meaning topless women (mostly white Europeans) who think they know the answer have painted slogans across their chests, chanted and burned flags outside of mosques. […]

Field of nightmares

Source: Asia Times: By Tom Engelhardt Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 – and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as ”the unintended consequences of policies that […]

Boston Bombers Do Not Represent American Muslims

Source: The Huffington Post By Rabbi Marc Schneier: President, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding; Vice President, World Jewish Congress In the wake of the horrific attacks in Boston last week perpetrated by two ethnic Chechen brothers who appear to have been motivated by extreme Islamist ideology, we are already seeing a dangerous […]

Confucius Institute opens in DC

Updated: 2013-04-11 10:54 By Joseph Boris in Washington (China Daily) Source: China Daily On a day of unseasonable heat that ensured all of Washington’s cherry blossoms had burst into full bloom, Chinese and American dignitaries opened the first Confucius Institute in the US capital, expressing hope for a flowering of […]