On June 16, a young white man motivated by white supremacist ideologies entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black Church in Charleston South Carolina, and murdered 9 of its congregants.
Latest posts
here & there
Coalitions and slippery slopes: The same-sex marriage debate continues
by The EditorsEarlier this summer, the Supreme Court of the United States confirmed the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry. Unsurprisingly, debates on the meaning and future of marriage have not subsided, but have taken on new directions. Among the hottest topics of debate are how American Muslims should respond to the ruling and whether polygamy will be the next battleground.
August 19, 2015
here & there
A View from the Margins of the Banlieue
by Jana GlaeseWhat light does the experience of Salafi Muslim women shed on satire mocking Islam and Muslims? New Directions in the Study of Prayer grantee Z. Fareen Parvez takes up this question in her recent article on the place of female Muslim piety in contemporary France.
August 18, 2015
here & there
Politics of Religious Freedom
by The EditorsIn a just-published edited volume, Politics of Religious Freedom, editors Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter Danchin ask contributors: what is religious freedom, why is it being promoted, and how are we talking about it?
August 10, 2015
Essays
The public voice of Muslim women
by Sindre BangstadIn an essay here back in 2011, I sounded the alarm about the ubiquity and mainstreaming of hate speech directed against Muslims in Norway. That item was published a mere month before a White, Norwegian, right-wing extremist—who claimed Christian conservative leanings, and who had, since 2006, drenched himself in the netherworld of far-right online conspiracy theories about Islam and Muslims in Europe—committed the worst terrorist attacks in modern Norwegian history, killing seventy-seven people in Oslo and at Utøya on July 22, 2011. In that essay I was concerned with a state of affairs in Norway in which anti-Muslim ideas and sentiments had become so ubiquitous in the media and in public discourse—and legitimate and necessary critique of “religion” so conflated with hate speech—that few seemed to have the stomach to engage in any form of counter-speech, and hate speech against Muslims was hardly ever prosecuted.
August 5, 2015
Christian Human Rights
Christianity, contemporary legacies, and the critique of secularism
by Samuel MoynMy last post took my response up to the twentieth century invention of “Christian human rights.” This one engages with crucial details about my case for continuity in that era before turning to the major challenge several of my commentators offer concerning my decision to stress discontinuity thereafter: if I am correct about the endurance of Christian politics in and through the inception of universal human rights, could it really be the case, as Paul Hanebrink asks, that “the decline of Christianity as a social and political force in 1960s Europe falls like a curtain” across the stage?
July 30, 2015
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