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Veteran reporter Robin Wright of The Washington Post has written a sprightly and encouraging article for Time about Muslims around the world who “do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy.” Instead, “They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them.”
I’ll ‘fess up, OK? I confess that I have been paying a bit of attention to the latest “What in the ^#@* has gone wrong with England story?” That would be the train wreck of coverage about young master Alfie Patten, the baby-faced (this word is included in almost every UK story) 13-year-old who has just become his land’s most famous baby father.
Trust me, I realize that what I am about to write falls into the “there he goes again, saying the same old things” category. I wish that wasn’t the case, but I know that it is.
In the April issue of The Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan has written an informative and sometimes chilling profile of Narendra Modi, chief minister of the northwestern state of Gujarat. Modi is important because of his increasing influence within the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and allegations that he helped encourage Hindu riots against Muslims in 2002.
I don’t watch American Idol, but I think that if I lived in a foreign culture, that country’s version of the show would be a great place to learn about that particular society. This rather amazing Guardian story on Afghanistan’s Afghan Star television show gives readers a glimpse into a society that we generally only hear in the news when it relates to war, terrorism and international politics. As a reader noted, how often do we hear about the regular people from Afghanistan, the ones who have put up with multiple invasions, governments and a bleak future.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral in March 1968. Robert Wright agrees, sort of, writing in the April Atlantic that “whether or not history has a purpose, its moral direction is hard to deny.” Wright’s essay is an 8,000-word argument that the three great monotheistic faiths may help create a more beneficent world through globalization.
Since the day this blog opened for business, your GetReligionistas been saying the same thing over and over about the structure of modern American religion.
Why did Lahore, Pakistan, think it was different? And different from what? Much has been made about how Lahore was perceived as different since the brutal, daylight attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
A GetReligion reader with an intense interest in history, especially in northern Africa and other regions bordering the Middle East, sent me the URL of to this haunting multi-media feature by CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson.
