The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.? We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a?political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when?whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering:?Where did our democracy go?

Today at Religion Dispatches, I interview Princeton philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout.?(This is a guy to look out for. His 2007 talk on “The Folly of Secularism” is probably the only academic lecture that has brought tears to my eyes.) We talked about about his latest book, Blessed Are the Organized, which came out last year—though it has been never been so relevant as now. Blessed Are the Organized?is an unusual kind of book in academic philosophy; Stout dwells in stories more than theories, recounting his travels among people doing local grassroots organizing in cities around the United States. Here’s how the interview got started:

Why are the organized “Blessed”?

Well, one definition of “blessed” is fortunate. In a shallow sense, the new elites are as fortunate as anyone has ever been. They practically monopolize society’s blessings. If we ask where the “happiness” of the 400 wealthiest Americans comes from, the answer has a lot to do with power, which is rooted in organizational structures. The CEOs of the mega-corporations acquired their power through some combination of luck and organizational skill. The elites are organized, and politicians are responsive to the organized. The richest among us are calling the tune while the politicians dance. Deregulation, the Bush tax cuts, and?Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission?all make sense when viewed in this context. The transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the rich in recent decades is so enormous as to be hard to fathom. But that transfer—like the wealth itself—is a product of organizational activity.

Unhappy are those who are scattered and isolated. Unhappy are those who are weakly linked. Democratic power is an organizational, relational affair. If there is any hope of creating a balance of power in our society, one that can hold elites accountable to the rest of us, it will have to come from grassroots organizing.

Read the rest at Religion Dispatches.

I recently had the chance to speak with Talal Asad, one of the leading anthropologists alive today, about the experience of being in Cairo earlier this year as the revolution unfolded around him. Our conversation appears this week at The Immanent Frame. What stuck out for him, and which he was still trying to find the words for, was a subtle but utterly pervasive kind of suspicion, one that often ran in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what.?Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers?Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

We also discussed the transition from violent to nonviolent resistance, blasphemy laws, and even the end of the world. Particularly choice, too, is this passage, where he describes a conversation about colonialism with the great literary theorist Edward Said, whose successor Asad arguably has become:

I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs returned to the stage earlier this month to announce a long-awaited new product: iCloud. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device,” he said. “We’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” No longer will the data that circumscribe our lives, from our dental records to our unfinished novels, remain confined to the tangible shells that presently contain them. They’ll live elsewhere, up there, in a better place.

Apple may be the latest to try, but no company has puffed out more clouds than Google. All of the Google services so many of us depend on — Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Reader, YouTube, Picasa — lure our electronic selves, bit by bit, out of our computers and up into the cloud. If the cloud is a heaven for our data, a better place up in the sky, then Google is, well, kind of like God. But what kind of God?

Some have actually tried to find out. Their efforts may appear to be mere intellectual exercises. But they raise serious questions about the nature of faith. In 2004, a Universal Life Church minister named Peter Olsen started the Universal Church of Google; last year, the misleadingly named First Church of Google appeared as well. But by far the most developed denomination is the Church of Google, founded by a reclusive young Canadian around 2006. It comes complete with scriptures, ministers, prayers, a holiday and, best of all, nine proofs that Google is “the closest thing to a ‘god’ human beings have ever directly experienced.”

Read the rest: “Google as God.”

In this interview, Butler stressed a theme that is actually the starting point for the discussion of nonviolence in her recent book Frames of War: the co-implication of violence and nonviolence, where neither can quite escape the other. I pushed back a bit, and so did she.

NS: Do these popular uprisings affect how we should think about power and sovereignty, as armed dictators are being coerced by nonviolent movements?

JB: I understand the desire to come up with theoretical generalizations. I spend a good deal of my time doing precisely that. But even though nonviolent practices have been important in some of these uprisings, we are also seeing new ways of interpreting nonviolence, and new ways of justifying violence when protestors are under attack from the military. The events in Libya are clearly violent, and so I think we are probably left with new quandaries about whether the line between violent and nonviolent resistance ever can be absolutely clear.

NS: Where in particular do you see that line blurring?

JB: We have to be careful to distinguish between nonviolence as a moral position that applies to all individuals and groups, and nonviolence as a political option that articulates a certain refusal to be intimidated or coerced. These are very different discourses, since most of the moral positions tend to eliminate all reference to power, and the political ones tend to affirm nonviolence as a mode of resistance but leave open the possibility that it might have to be exchanged for a more overtly aggressive one. I am not sure we can ever evacuate the political frame. Moreover, it is important to think about how one understands violence. If one puts one’s body on the line, in the way of a truck or a tank, is one not entering into a violent encounter? This is different from waging a unilateral attack or even starting a violent series, but I am not sure that it is outside the orbit of violence altogether.

NS: President Obama sometimes seems to be policing that distinction in his rhetoric about these uprisings: demanding that protesters and regimes both remain nonviolent, and then bringing U.S. military force to bear in Libya when the state turns to military force. But I would think the difference between how the movements in Egypt and Libya have progressed actually reaffirms that the line between violence and nonviolence is a useful one.

JB: Well, it is interesting that the U.S. affirms that the anti-government forces in Libya are resistance fighters and seeks to provide aerial bombing support to their forces on the ground. So it seems that even liberal public discourse makes room for justified armed resistance. What is most interesting is to figure out when certain forms of violence are considered part of an admirable struggle for freedom, and when, on the contrary, violence is understood as the terrorist activities of non-state actors.?Do you have an answer to that?

NS: I certainly can’t think of a consistent rule that would apply to all cases, and probably for good reason. The case of Israel-Palestine comes to mind.

JB: Indeed, it does.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I interview Colin Jager, professor of English at Rutgers and an authority on natural theology in British romanticism. He’s the author of, literally, The Book of God. Our conversation touches on many things swirling through my mind in connection with the book I’m working on—design, debate, and the existence of God. Here’s a bit of the exchange with Jager:

NS: The design arguments for God’s existence that you address in The Book of God are typically treated by philosophers and the public as sheer abstractions, or even scientific hypotheses; why treat them instead as literary creations?

CJ: No one discipline owns the design argument and its critiques. Historically, the distinctions that people typically draw today among literature, philosophy, and theology just don’t hold up. Professional literary study, especially, has only been around for a hundred years or so. A thinker like David Hume, who is very important to the story I tell about design, did not think of himself as a philosopher but as man of letters: he wrote history, philosophy, and theology, and he served as a diplomatic secretary. This was a typical “literary” career. I try to restore some of that broad range to the topics I write about—though no diplomats have signed me up yet!

NS: What’s an example of how you, as a scholar of literature, can shed light on a philosophical debate?

CJ: In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo, who is skeptical of design arguments, wins the battle, but Cleanthes, who supports them, wins the war. One thing Hume might be suggesting is that if you’re on Philo’s team, you’d best give up your belief that better arguments can win the day all on their own. Yes, the philosophical or conceptual idea of design seems rather abstract, but, at the same time, those arguments are lived and experienced by real people in real time. This is one thing Hume figured out—and it’s a literary point, if you want to put it that way: the rhetoric, the habits of mind, the practices of sociability that accompany what we could call the culture of design aren’t just window-dressing for some philosophical argument. Those things are the argument. That’s why the culture of design is easier to come at through literature rather than the history of philosophy—through practice rather than theory, if you will. We’ve misunderstood the way secularization works if we think that better arguments drive the discussion.

NS: To what extent are Chinese scholars working in China also studying religion as you are—that is, not only as an artifact of the past, but as something alive and active in contemporary Chinese society?

MY: There is a growing number of Chinese scholars engaged in the study of religious cultures. In the 1980s and ’90s, their work was primarily textual and focused on the historical past of Chinese religious traditions. This was a safe way to deal with a still sensitive topic and to stay out of trouble. Now a new generation of social scientists is looking at the present through fieldwork. Their biggest task is to persuade the government, its many bureaucrats and local officials, and society at large, to think of religion as a promising way to deal with the present and future. They have even started to challenge the Marxist position that religion serves the ruling class and will necessarily disappear.

NS: To what extent do scholars have the freedom to do so publicly?

MY: Actually, there is now almost no constraint on what can be said out loud, but print publication is another matter. Internet discussions, meanwhile, stand in-between what can be said and what can be printed.

NS: So the study of religion in China has become a medium of dissent?

MY: Yes. These scholars are implicitly trying to correct for a century of activist state intervention and prohibition. Intellectuals have been at the forefront of religious revival, and many academic conferences on Buddhism, Daoism, and popular deity cults have laid the groundwork for religious organizations and activities to proceed. Academics serve as advisors or consultants to religious organizations; they are a bridge between religious communities and officialdom. They have called on the state to recognize the vast “underground” Christian communities—about 70 percent of all Christians in China—who refuse to join the state churches. A few are even starting to point out that the decades of hostility towards indigenous religions may be responsible for the dramatic growth of Christianity in the past three decades.? Scholars have also tackled the new problems of the over-commercialization of religion, in which local state tourism and real estate agencies seize upon it to drum up business, riding roughshod over Buddhist or Daoist monks’ ability to run their temples in their own way. Of course, this is still a small segment of the Chinese intelligentsia, and the vast majority still dismiss religion.

[Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published a study of the apostle Paul, whom he took as an exemplar of his own influential philosophy of the “event”. Three years later, Giorgio Agamben responded in Italian with The Time That Remains, a painstaking exegesis of the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The purpose of both was not a more enlightened piety, but an inquiry into the texture of revolution. Paul is significant to them because he ushered in, and in the process described, a genuinely transformational social movement.

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

“Bonjour, hello,” I’m told, finally reaching the front of the long line at the convention center cafe. It’s Montreal. I can say “bonjour,” at least. Wouldn’t that be polite? But that could invite an incomprehensible flurry of Quebecois French, which would only serve to remind me how utterly I failed to learn the language from my dear mother, who is fluent. “Hello,” I say, and order a breakfast sandwich without the ham. It comes with ham anyway.

“How’s your French?” I ask my friend, a graduate student who is here to give a paper that examines the early Christian thinker Origen through the perverse lens of Georges Bataille. “I can read it fairly well.” When he orders, he orders in English too.

Religion is back in Montreal, a city that, when it tore off the habit of de facto clerical rule during the last century, thought it had done away with the stuff. Body parts and sexual acts aren’t the bad words here (the neon awnings of strip clubs abound); say the name of a part of a Catholic church out of context in Quebecois French, and chances are you’re cussing. But over the last week, frustrating every hope for blessed la?cité, 4,500 religion scholars converged under the shadow of the royal mount for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.

Fortunately for the city’s liberated residents, few of these name-badged guests ventured many blocks beyond the downtown Disneyland of the Palais de Congres and its neighboring hotel towers. Even if they had, though, it’s unlikely that they would have poisoned sensible Canada with the most fearsome religious cargo of its southward neighbor. No revival tents were set up, nor were certain sexual preferences being visibly protested. Indeed, one of the AAR’s most illustrious and observant members has suggested that Paul Tillich might be the “unacknowledged theoretician of our entire enterprise.” It is the academic leftover of the eminent reasonableness that caused and continues to cause the self-immolation of what anachronistically still calls itself “mainline” religiosity, along with its various outgrowths and fellow-travelers.

Here, atheist ritual scholars and seminary educators can gab about Foucault, saving their mutual disapproval for afterward, while downing cocktails with graduate students at departmental receptions. Buddhist nuns walk in costume alongside bearded anabaptists. Eastern Orthodox priests, speaking of beards, shudder in their robes as queer theory takes hold of their Church Fathers. Tenured professors preach a theology of liberation for the poor.

Compared to previous years, the signs of the economic crisis are evident. The reception of my Californian alma mater made manifest Arnold’s massive budget cuts across the UC system: we had to buy our own drinks—or, rather, borrow them from the lavish spread of a Christian publisher next door. (For a Fortress, they hardly put up any defense.) The exhibit hall was sparse, as some American publishing houses declined to make the trip. The Templeton Foundation’s massive, canopied display that I always look forward to each year (it gets bigger and bigger) was reduced to a tiny nook. The most visible vendor of all was Edwin Mellen Press, an outfit that I was specifically warned against by a librarian as a vanity operation. The name graced every tote bag worn by every attendee and the back of every program book.

If nothing else, though, there was the usual fix of secret celebrities—the people who might not attract notice walking down Fifth Avenue but the sight of whom here causes palpitations in grad students. This year, they included the magnificent James Cone who, together with Cornel West, told the story of civil rights as it unfolded in the halls of elite theology—delivering me my annual fix of hope in my profession. Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim who before was unable to attend due to being blacklisted by the U.S. government, gave a distinctly unterroristic talk about matters facing global Islam today. The Slovenian rock star philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminded us that true Christianity is atheism, just after Thomas J.J. Altizer, still dressed in the bright green suit that would have been wearable in his heyday, proclaimed the self-annihilating, kenotic God (vis a vis Satan) of Hegel and Blake: total, apocalyptic, and dead. The same might be said of his present reputation—but that doesn’t keep him from putting on quite a show.

Making my way back to these états-Unis, the selfsame home of old-time religion and morally bankrupt financial markets, gone is the holy order of tenure, the wondrous dreamland of harmonious diversity, the obligatory church of discussion panels, and the blessed sacrament of coffee. Into the splendid, ugly realness once again.