At Foreign Affairs, Karen Barkey looks at Oliver Roy‘s book Holy Ignorance.
Posts Tagged ‘religion and culture’
July 23rd, 2012
Purity balls
posted by Wei ZhuAt Religion Dispatches, Jessica Valenti writes on a new Swiss documentary, Virgin Tales, and the phenomenon of purity balls.
June 26th, 2012
Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and Public Life
posted by Candice ScharfThe Knight Program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism is accepting applications until July 1st, for the Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and Public Life.
June 21st, 2012
Social eugenics, unintended consequences, and dropped balls
posted by Greg Johnson
These essays provoked me in a number of ways, especially with their combined penchant for probing raw nerves. Indeed, I didn’t fully understand how raw—let’s say conflicted—I was about religious freedom discourses and practices until this intervention was staged. In the spirit of therapy, then, we can begin: “Hi, my name is Greg, and I’ve led a carefree lifestyle, all along assuming religious freedom is a good thing. I’ve been drinking this cocktail for years; it has become part of my identity. Thanks to these scholars, I’ve been sober for three days.”
April 30th, 2012
Nahda’s return to history
posted by Nadia MarzoukiThe Tunisian uprisings of December 2010 are often depicted in negative terms, as lacking leadership, ideology, and political organization. Nahda (the Tunisian Islamist movement that, after decades of exile and repression, won 40 percent of the seats in the elections of October 2011) members are now accused of working to turn Tunisia into a “sharia state,” in which religious freedom, women’s rights, and freedom of expression would cease to exist. While the fears of individuals and groups who disagree with Islamists have to be taken seriously, discussion of current changes needs to be based on a real engagement, not on caricature.
April 27th, 2012
Beyond establishment
posted by Lori G. BeamanReligious freedom and religious establishment have come to mean many things to many people. This is, in part, because of the shifting contours of the definition of religion itself (as has been pointed out by others in this series, including Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd). But it is also because the nature of freedom is contested ground. The shifting nature of these two concepts makes normative assessment—religious freedom is good, religious freedom is bad—extremely difficult to carry out in any meaningful way. Further, when people advocate for or against religious freedom they are often talking about very different things. Similarly, the measurement of establishment is equally nebulous.
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