Do not ‘essentialise’ religion. Gandhi’s Gita and Azad’s Quran do not say the same thing as the Gita of Nathuram Godse and the Quran of Osama bin Laden.
Until recently, often in private and sometimes publicly, the complaint was voiced that moderate Muslims do not speak out or not loudly enough (...)
He seems like a lovely, modest man, but there’s no sign he will change the church’s stance on issues that matter to women.
Pope Francis seems a lovely man. He washes the feet of prisoners, drives a Ford Focus and lives in the Vatican guesthouse instead of the isolated papal apartments. He even (...)
One of Paris’s most prestigious theatres was being protected by riot police and guard-dog patrols on Thursday after it became the latest target in a wave of Catholic protests across France against so-called “blasphemous” plays.
The head of the Théâtre du Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées complained (...)
The Government of Lanka says that on Wesak day this year, 2600 years after Buddha will be completed. Of course there are those who dispute the calculations of advisers to the government. In any case it must be approximately true; and after so many years it is worth making an investigation into (...)
In the first year of the 21st century, Osama stretched the dominant Islamic thought of the 20th century to its extreme. A decade later, there is a growing body of books, lectures and pages of the World Wide Web propounding an Islam that is at home with the modern world and vice versa.
Behind (...)
The publication of a statement in the name of the Hungarian Social Forum SR praising the beatification of John Paul II called for vigourous answers, especially from Polish feminist movements.
Hungarian Social Forum SR over the beatification of John Paul II In a Press Release (...)
Is the pope Catholic? The whole world broke out the champagne the weekend before Thanksgiving when the news came that Pope Benedict XVI had approved the use of condoms in certain circumstances to prevent the transmission of HIV. In Light of the World, a new collection of interviews with the (...)
Faith-based organizations are playing increasingly prominent roles in service delivery. However, the premise that such organisations promote gender equality and the empowerment of women needs critical re-examination.
Faith-based organizations play a central role in welfare provision and (...)
The enthusiasm for Islamified world at times assumes ironically absurd character. For instance, in 1996 the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain recommended that all mosques in the UK be wired up to the network in order to provide porn-free access to Internet and [to] establish places where (...)
Glenn Beck’s efforts to transform himself from Fox News demagogue into a religious leader for Tea Party America has a lot of commentators discussing the feasibility of a Mormon convert leading a wary evangelical and Catholic right in a faith-driven cause. While there are significant roadblocks (...)
I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. And I find myself in a (...)
Mosque is organised like a church as access to a mosque is through membership-an idea clearly borrowed, out of economic consideration, from the Norwegian State-Church relationship.
The Norwegian-Pakistanis came as labour migrants in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s from certain specific villages (...)
None of the main political party manifestos tackle the encroachment of religion on our society. As more and more public spaces are devoured by religious interests creating particular problems for women, Rahila Gupta argues that it is time to end state funding of religion and faith based (...)
A veteran analyst of right-wing militancy notices a creeping maturity in the media’s ability to talk about the religious elements of terrorism—even when it’s Christian.
The arrest of the Michigan-based Hutaree Militia has drawn worldwide attention, and in so doing surfaced one of the knottiest (...)
Christian Soldiers of the Apocalypse have been running around the woods of Michigan planning attacks on federal law enforcement in their war against the Antichrist. How does the Hutaree Militia fit into the history of American militias and conspiracy theorists?
On Monday, the nine members of (...)
I thought President Obama’s Cairo speech was basically fine: begin anew, extend the hand, reject “crude stereotypes” all around, turn the page on the Christian triumphalism of the Bush years. But there’s no denying that the section on women’s rights was rather minimal, just three paragraphs, (...)
It is beyond doubt that many people around the world, of various political opinions and creeds, will feel relieved after the discourse the President of the USA delivered in Cairo today. It is apparently a new voice, a voice of peace, quite far from Bush’s clash of civilisations. But is it so? (...)
Melbourne,
The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, has threatened that Catholic hospitals could be forced to close emergency and maternity wards if a proposed bill to decriminalise abortion is passed.
The bill was passed unamended in the state’s Lower House on September 12, and will (...)
The visit to Sydney for World Youth Day (WYD), July 15-20, by Pope Benedict XVI and 300,000 Catholic pilgrims is set to become the scene for protests.
Ironically, the protests are being fuelled by the clumsy efforts of the NSW state government to suppress them — passing laws making it illegal (...)
Pope Benedict XVI is coming to town. Sydney is once again to be subject to a special police regime as this saintly, celibate white man bravely preaches the joys of sexual abstinence in the very Circus Maximus of Sin City (Randwick race course).
Pope Benedict is also the CEO of a very big (...)
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