Children Are Dying and We Don’t Care
Due to human-made famine, cholera outbreak, and bombs, about 150 Yemeni children die every day; every ten minutes a Yemeni child dies from preventable causes such as malnutrition, diarrhea, and respiratory infections. Eighty percent of Yemen’s 27 million people, nearly half of them under the age of 19, struggle to live under the most desperate famine conditions. In the past three years, more than 3 million Yemenis have been forced to flee their homes. Little wonder that on April 3 UN Secretary-General António Guterres called Yemen “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
Co-authored with my student Shania Mason
Trump Does Not Represent
If the United States were a democracy, Donald Trump would not be president. Despite Russian intrusions into the election, Hilary Clinton garnered 3,000,000 more votes than Trump. Moreover, Trump received only 63 million votes out of 241 million eligible voters, only 26% of eligible voters.
Donald Trump and the Politics of Jesus
Donald Trump‘s biggest voting bloc is white Christian men. Evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Jr. and James Dobson have endorsed him. The American Association of Evangelicals has written an open letter to Christians “who assist the anti-Christian Progressive political movement in America,” calling them to repent and to return to “the true Gospel.”
Emblems of Anti-semitism
They went to Charlottesville, they said, to peacefully protest the removal of a statue of Confederate War General, Robert E. Lee; they were simply exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly. Western civilization itself, they said, was at stake. So they rallied defenders of our culture, our country and our heritage.
White Christian Terrorists
On August 12, 2017, white Christian terrorist, James Fields Jr, drove his car into a crowd of peaceful, anti-hate protestors in Charlottesville, VA, killing a young woman and injuring nineteen. Fields had driven from Ohio to join his fellow white Christian terrorists—aka, “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis,” “KKK,” “segregationists,” “extremists,” “neo-Confederates,” “militia,” or “white nationalists.” Since calling them, “the alt-right” obscures their hatred and violence, let’s call these dangerous bigots by their real name, WHITE CHRISTIAN TERRORISTS!!!
Thinking Together in Peace
On May 9-14, 2017, thirty-two Muslim, Christian and Jewish philosophers and scientists—from fourteen different countries—gathered at the Fetzer Institute’s Seasons retreat center in Kalamazoo, Michigan to discuss issues in science and religion. The topics presented by our preeminent senior scholars were heady and foreboding: “Pragmatic Probabilities: Dutch-Book Theorems vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation,” “Quantum Theory and Randomness,” and “Fine Tuning in Cosmology.” But the more important challenge was breaking down our imposing national, cultural and religious barriers and building bridges across some of our world’s deepest and most painful divides.
Where Christians and Muslims Live in Peace
Before departing for my recent trip to Jordan in the Middle East, I was repeatedly asked if I feared for my safety. Such questions are not new to me. Since my daughter has lived in Jordan for the past three years, I have repeatedly been asked variations of, “How do you sleep at night when your daughter lives in such an unsafe [usually meant “Muslim”] country?”
Dangerously Uninformed, Part II
In my previous blog, I argued that attributing extremist violence solely or even mostly to religious belief is dangerously uninformed. I showed why that claim is uninformed. On to the dangerous part.
Perpetuating the myth that religion is the primary cause of terrorism plays into ISIS’s hands and prevents recognition of our responsibility for creating the conditions for ISIS.
Dangerously Uninformed: Religion and Violence
Maarten Boudry argues that religion and religion alone motivates ISIS and ISIS-like extremists to violence. He claims (without citation) that other factors, “socio-economic disenfranchisement, unemployment, troubled family backgrounds, discrimination and racism,” have been “repeatedly refuted.” Thinking that religion plays any lesser motivational role is, he claims, “a dramatic failure of imagination.”
The Health Risks of a Muslim Ban
Two of my best Muslim friends are physicians in my hometown. Dr. Aly Abdel-Mageed is a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, specializing in pediatric blood and bone marrow transplant. Eleven year-old Lilly Vanden Bosch, who has suffered from life-threatening aplastic anemia since age seven, is grateful for Dr. Mageed’s care and prayer. When she grows up, she hopes to become a hematologist. Dr. Mageed is an immigrant from Egypt, earning his medical degree from the University of Alexandria. Dr. Mohammed Saleh is an internist whose patients uniformly consider him both knowledgeable and caring.
Our Good Muslim Neighbors
Nearly every American can claim ancestors who were immigrants, many of whom were refugees from oppression and religious intolerance. They came here to find freedom and to seek opportunities that were not available in the land they left. It’s difficult to leave one’s home forever and crossing an ocean was no easy passage, but the hope of a new life was a powerful incentive. Upon arrival, the willingness to work hard in a new land was key to their success.
Breaking Biases & Preventing Prejudice
ISIS's Most Powerful Weapon
When famed director, Frank Capra, was commissioned in 1941 by the U.S. government to create a series of propaganda films to inspire “our boys” as part of the war effort, he looked for inspiration at the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. He commented that the film “fired no gun, dropped no bombs. But as a psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist, it was just as lethal.” Now, several decades later, such sophisticated uses of media are key weapons in the arsenal of ISIS’s and Al-Qaeda’s recruiting tactics.
Alvin Plantinga and the Revival of Religious Philosophy
I remember that first day of class like it was yesterday. I had enrolled in Notre Dame’s PhD program in philosophy to learn from Alvin Plantinga. The first time I saw him, he strode into the classroom, pulled out a chair, set his feet on the seat and his bottom on the back, rolled up his sleeves, and started lecturing in his deep, resonant voice. As the semester went on, we started taking bets on when he might pitch backward off his precarious position. But he never did.
Religion and Violence
Maarten Boudry has argued here at 3 Quarks Daily that religion and religion alone motivates ISIS and ISIS-like extremists to violence. He claims (without citation) that other factors, "socio-economic disenfranchisement, unemployment, troubled family backgrounds, discrimination and racism," have been "repeatedly refuted." Thinking that religion plays any lesser motivational role is, he claims, "a dramatic failure of imagination."
Our Good Muslim Neighbors
Nearly every American can claim ancestors who were immigrants, many of whom were refugees from oppression and religious intolerance. They came here to find freedom and to seek opportunities that were not available in the land they left. It’s difficult to leave one’s home forever and crossing an ocean was no easy passage, but the hope of a new life was a powerful incentive. Upon arrival, the willingness to work hard in a new land was key to their success.
‘Je Suis Turkey’
In January 2015, extremists killed 12 people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. The phrase, Je Suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”) swept Twitter and then Facebook and then newspapers and then the world. Je Suis Charlie expressed empathy for the cartoonists as well as support for freedom of speech.
Muslims, Mass Shootings and the Media
The most up to date tally of mass shootings in the U.S. shows that there have been 207 mass shootings in 2015 so far (where “mass shooting” is defined as four or more people shot in one incident). Shooting Tracker, “the world’s only crowdsourced mass shooting tracker,” provides the best record of these atrocities. While aimed at the U.S.’s overly generous gun policies, the site is revealing in at least one other regard: of the 207 mass shootings so far this year, precisely 1 (the July 16, 2015 Chattanooga murders) was committed by a Muslim. The other 206? It’s hard to tell because many suspects have not been identified. But, and here’s the point, they are not identifiably Muslim and Islamic terrorism was not identifiably the motive.
