Link Roundup for Jan 16-22

Posted by: on Jan 22, 2010 | No Comments
  • Religion Dispatches has a roundup of all of their posts on Haiti.
  • National Public Radio posts an excellent satire of Satan’s open letter to Pat Robertson. The Onion has a similarly humorous/dismissive response.
  • The Guardian interviews Shlomo Sand, author of the popular book The Invention of the Jewish People. What might have been another standard anti-Zionism piece brings the public contestation of religion into it quite clearly.
    Key excerpt: “But, say Sand’s critics, since all national identities are myths, why pick on the Jews? Only a few fundamentalists think God actually promised Israel to Moses. Meanwhile, millions of Jews feel a cultural and religious attachment to Zion. It is in their liturgy and their sense of self. It is no fiction.”

  • Muslim Voices discusses the relationship between European and Muslim identities.
  • The National Catholic Reporter has a large sampling of the reactions to the Pope’s recent visit to the primary synagogue in Rome.
  • Dunedin School reports on the use of biblical verses by a Michigan-based defense contractor. But Missives From Marx proffers a rejoinder to the discourse as a whole, criticizing the politics of authenticity that underlies much of it. The BBC reports that the firm will stop making such inscriptions.
  • Roland Boer mocks nostalgia for returning to a pre-secular “enchanted” worldview.