RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wesleyan President Michael Roth on the importance of understanding religious experience—and the difficulty teaching it

It happens every year. In teaching my humanities class, I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about the immortality of the soul or salvation, and suddenly my normally loquacious undergraduates start staring down intently at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with an answer: predestination, faith not works, etc.

But if I go on to ask them how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their notes. They look anywhere but at me, for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In this intellectual history class, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when the topic of religious feeling and experience comes up, they would obviously just prefer that I move on to another subject.

What’s with Kim Jong-Un’s Hair? By Rick Moran

Who would have thunk it? North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un a fashion maven?

Say it ain’t so, Kimmy.

“Quirky” is an understatement. It looks like a cross between a 1950s “rocket” haircut and a bad afro from the 1980s.

And check out those “emoticon” eyebrows. Does Kim plan to star in an anime porn film?

Kim Jong Un’s latest hack job created another international incident.

North Korea watchers combing through the supreme leader’s appearance at a politburo meeting Wednesday were struck by Kim’s new look.

Kim was photographed with shrunken eyebrows the size of emoticons and cartoonishly high hair.

“O Europeans, the Islamic State did not initiate a war against you, as your governments and media try to make you believe. It is you who started the transgression against us, and this you deserve blame and you will pay a great price…. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah.” — From a jihadist video threatening Italy.

“We Muslims in no way need your help to drag us down into a sad, Western culture where youth suffer from a capitalist existential void which causes widespread depression, addiction, self-injury, and even an alarmingly high rate of suicide. It is clearly the Danish people who need help to find the correct meaning of life, and here we would like to help.” — Junes Kock, Danish convert to Islam and spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Scandinavia.

“There seems to be something going on in Scandinavian countries, and I think it’s been the reluctance to actually identify and confront hate preachers.” — Haras Rafiq, managing director, Quilliam Foundation.

Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history.

Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them on by promising that the Middle East would be just like Europe and then ISIS tore up their Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and chopped off their heads.

But ISIS also believes that it’s on the right side of history. Its history is the Koran. The right side of its history is what Iraq and Syria look like today. It’s also how parts of Europe are starting to look.

Progressive politicians and pundits trying to cope with ISIS lapse into a shrill incoherence that has nothing to do with their outrage at its atrocities and a lot to do with their sheer incomprehension. Terms like “apocalyptic nihilism” get thrown around as if heavy metal were beginning to make a comeback.

Can Jews just pick up and move?

Last Saturday, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein opened fire during an event on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” at a cultural center in Copenhagen, killing one attendee and wounding three police officers. The following day, he shot and killed Jewish security guard Dan Uzan and wounded a number of policemen outside the Great Synagogue, during a bat mitzvah celebration.

These attacks in Denmark were eerily similar to those that took place in Paris last month. First the terrorist targeted “infidels” who dare offend Muslims by expressing their views freely, and then he went after the Jews.

While the events in Copenhagen were unfolding, a cemetery in France was discovered to have been desecrated days earlier, with some 250 headstones vandalized and overturned.

Islamist criminal and terrorist networks overlap for a simple reason: both involve the same sort of individuals doing the same sort of things. European governments know this, because they operate in the common ground between crime and Jihad. Declarations by European officials to the effect that Jihadi terrorists are really violent criminals in search of a pretext are a particularly revolting sort of hypocrisy. Possibly the most disgusting thing I have read in a publication that purports to be mainstream is Andrew Higgins’ Copenhagen dispatch in yesterday’s New York Times.

[Copenhagen terrorist Omar Abdel Hamid] Hussein’s journey from drug-addled street thug to self-proclaimed jihadist declaring loyalty to the Islamic State has stirred soul-searching in liberal-minded Denmark over whether Islam, in fact, was really a prime motivator for his violence, or merely served as a justifying cover for violent criminality.“This is a very difficult question to answer,” said Manu Sareen, the minister for integration and social affairs, who shortly before the attacks began a program to combat radicalization through outreach to parents, schools and other efforts.….Often the attackers invoke Islam. But just as often, well before they had found religion, the professed jihadists built up long track records as violent criminals. Though many have become radicalized in prisons, they often seem determined to find an outlet for their violence.

Moshe Phillips is president and Benyamin Korn is chairman of the Religious Zionists of America, Philadelphia, and both are candidates on the Religious Zionist slate (www.VoteTorah.org) in the World Zionist Congress elections.
The campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress has reached a new low, crossing the line that divides criticism of Israel from the darkest antisemitic canards.
We do not use the term “antisemitism” lightly. Criticism of individual Israeli leaders or specific Israeli government policies is of course perfectly legitimate. But every sober-minded observer understands that criticism of Israel is sometimes just a thin mask for promoting anti-Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories.
The campaign of whispers, leaks and rumors against Prime Minister Netanyahu this week dropped that mask and began promoting one of the ugliest anti-Jewish canards: that Israel is trying to control the United States government.
A full-page ad in The New York Times on Feb. 19 featured photos of a smiling President Obama and a scowling Prime Minister Netanyahu, under the headline: “Who is our Commander in Chief?”
The message could not have been more clear: the Israelis –the Zionists, the pro-Israel lobby, the Jews– are trying to turn Israel’s prime minister into America’s commander in chief.

Even now, after many years of unwavering Iranian commitment to “the bomb,” Washington still refuses to give up hope on diplomacy. Soon, however, President Barack Obama and his supporters will finally understand that Iran’s posture on nuclear “negotiations” has always been a contrivance. Then, when even the most residual military options will already have been forfeited, Israel’s only remaining hope for long term survival will likely have to rest upon certain indispensably complementary strategies for nuclear deterrence and ballistic missile defense.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that Israel can never rely too heavily upon anti-missile defense systems. Inevitably, such systems would have “leakage.” Like it or not, therefore, Israel will have to depend upon some form of “coexistence” with an already nuclear Iran. Although an eleventh-hour preemption against Iranian nuclear assets and infrastructures might still seem appropriate in some circles, it could no longer be undertaken without incurring genuinely overwhelming costs.

This post is a analytical explanation of a film produced by Al-Hayat Media of the Islamic State, which portrays the ritual slaughter of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, in the film “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross”. Words in blue are from the film, either in the form of titles or sub-titles, or as narration. Text in red is for the words of Muhammad or the Qur’an. This is Part 2 of a paid of posts about this film. Part 1 is Bearing the cross: a letter to the Islamic State. This post has also appeared on Lapido Media.

The Coast of Wilāyat Tarābulus [in the region of Tripoli] by the Mediterranean Sea

The people of the cross, the followers of the hostile Egyptian Church

The opening scenes show the 21 men being led along the coast towards the camera, each one held by a hooded captor.

This is the first of a two-part post on the 21 Egyptian martyrs killed in Libya. This first part is a reflection, as a Christian, on aspects of this event and reactions to it. The second part, ‘A message signed with blood to the Nation of the Cross’ consists of explanatory notes on the texts – spoken and written – which were part of the Islamic State’s film of their ritual beheadings. This post has also appeared on Lapido media.

The Islamic State sent me a letter this week. This letter was in the form of a short film produced by the Islamic State’s Al-Hayat Media centre. This was not addressed to me personally, but to all Christians everywhere. Its title was A Message Signed with BLOOD to the Nation of the Cross. This was a video of the ritual slaughter of the 21 Egyptian Christians. Their blood flowing in the ocean waves was the ‘signature’ at the end of the video.

As I write this it is Ash Wednesday. This is the start of forty days of Lent, a period of fasting and contemplation for Christians all over the world. For many centuries it has been a custom of Christians to receive a mark of the cross in ash upon the forehead as a sign of repentance.

As I received this mark of the cross today I was thinking of the 21 Egyptian Christian martyrs. Copts permanently bear the sign of the cross, tattooed on their wrists, as a sign that they will refuse to renounce their beliefs.