Tag: orientalism
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Beautiful Dreamers
Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful. If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind,…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
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Nonviolence from the Unlikeliest of Places
What does it take to imagine that nonviolent approaches to conflict might be possible? Millennia-old religious traditions? A prophet? Common sense? Certainly the last place one would expect to find it: a race of hardened warriors in a hardened land, where a gun is part of the common attire and tribal feuds last for generations.…
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A Godly Test
Search magazine has just posted “Evolving Allah,” an article of mine on how people think about evolution in the Middle East. More in-depth than my earlier piece for Seed, it revolves around my interview with Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), the leader of a Turkish religious community known for his passion for creationism. When Oktar…
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Who Are These Women?
Along the ramparts of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there is a small exhibition of ancient female figurines, among them the oldest sculpture in the museum’s collection. What strange forms! Where are the supermodels, where are the Barbie dolls? At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw…
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Summarizing Jordan
At breakfast overlooking Jordan’s gorgeous Wadi Dhana nature preserve, my companion Mary and I got to talking with an Australian family in the middle of a several months’ tour across the world. The father, an environmental scientist, asked if we had any books in English to swap. He just finished what he had been reading,…
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The New Young Turks
Among the young, jet-setting Turks I’ve met who are interested in Islam, there is a common narrative. I heard it from a successful international book distributor, from a clerk at my hotel, and from a shy university student. You grow up in a family that considered itself Muslim but didn’t really pay much mind to…
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Ancient Scribbles
A very satisfying day at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. As is typical, I got so thoroghly engrossed by the relatively small collection of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that I hardly had energy for the vast halls of pottery and burial monuments from antique Anatolia. Even so, the splendor of the Alexander Sarcophagous from Sidon (as well as…
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Half Asleep in Istanbul
I’ve just arrived in Istanbul, Turkey to begin a little more than two weeks in the Middle East. The mission: an article on science and Islam (plus the unexpected). I’m in a hostel overlooking the Bosphorus with Michael Jackson music videos playing, one after another. It was a spectacularly beautiful day to arrive at a…