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Over the last few decades, the secular study of religion on America's campuses has become a right-wing pinata. In the full understanding that they are swimming against the cultural, if not the academic, stream the folks at the new Institute pulled out Rushdie, who, although he is not one of their faculty members, writes fiction that acknowledges the centrality of faith to culture without the author's pious participation. From his astounding breakthrough work, Midnight's Children, through his current The Enchantress of Florence, he has been obsessed with both formal and informal belief, but from the point...
...language on certain topics. "I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words," he said. "For instance, 'soul." I don't believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn't a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you're religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion...
...Rushdie resumed his version of a normal life: there was no obvious security at last week's event. But that experience allowed him to make a strong indirect point in favor of the new Institute. Conservative clerics and talk show hosts have complained bitterly at the way that secular universities treat religion - sometimes justifiably. When scholars insist on seeing faith as a brute exercise in authoritarianism they are being almost as reductive as religious fundamentalists. But at its best, secular religious study continues to offer a freedom that institutions entrenched firmly in one or another faith tradition can simply...
...character worship. He’s not going to save the world. But he’s going to inspire each of us to do as much as we can. Perhaps Nelson Mandela put it best in his own letter to the President-elect. The world’s secular saint pointed to Obama’s personal narrative as proof that “no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.” As President of the United States of America, and as nominal...
...what Damascus says is an attempt to block jihadists from slipping into Syria. These recent developments have raised speculation that Syria is threatened by a blowback from jihadist militants who no longer have easy access to cross the border into Iraq and instead are turning their attention to the secular regime in Damascus. "We assumed the Syrians were chucking people in jail, which they could be doing, but it could also be that the foreign fighters are backing up at the border with Iraq and they can't go home because their own governments will arrest them," says Andrew Tabler...