My students taught me that everything was personal - history, politics, foreign relations - but this approach creates boundaries as well as connections
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what about faith?Guest editor and Columist Dave Belden, a self-confessed agnostic, challenges us all to examine what faith and religion mean to us in the 21st Century. From the most extreme fundamentalism to cosmopolitan cynics, we all want something to believe in.
The first graduation of rabbis in Germany since 1945 is an opportunity to revivify the great German-Jewish cultural symbiosis and to place Jewish community life anew at Europe's heart, says Julia Neuberger, in her address to mark the occasion at Dresden’s Abraham Geiger College. Read the rest of this post...
When Britain's prime minister mentions God on primetime TV, millions of citizens are puzzled or outraged. Is this Tony Blair's problem, or theirs? Callum Brown traces the long withdrawing whimper of "Christian Britain". Read the rest of this post...
Pope Benedict XVI must address African poverty to avoid jettisoning the Catholic Church’s African following, and his predecessor’s legacy, says David Mikhail. Read the rest of this post...
In his long life, the Polish pope, Karol Wojtyła, was at the forefront of the struggle for liberty. But in his twenty-six years at the Vatican, where did this towering figure stand on democracy? The distinguished writer Neal Ascherson dissects an ambiguous legacy. Read the rest of this post...
Mel Gibson’s controversial new film, “The Passion of Christ”, is violent, harrowing and almost impossible to watch. So don’t, recommends Dave Belden. Read the rest of this post...
The Shaker religious community survived 18th century emigration from England to America to build a pacific community of sexual equals. Its founder’s “birthday” on 29 February is an occasion to celebrate a creative adaptation embodied in the Shakers’ unique design heritage. Read the rest of this post...
The argument of Khoren Arisian that religious extremism poses a danger to American democracy is simplistic and ahistorical. The Puritan impact on American politics contains egalitarian vigour as well as intolerance, social conscience as well as theological dogma. Be patient, says Dave Belden: the descendants of today’s fundamentalists will champion a new era of social liberalism. Read the rest of this post...
The danger of religious fundamentalism has been present in the American political bloodstream since the arrival of the Puritans. Now, with a government of religious conservatives locked in a polarising mindset of us-them and good-evil, the threat it poses is not just to American freedom, but to the world’s. Read the rest of this post...
Hollywood products like “The Matrix”, “X-Men” and their sequels indulge the spectacle of violence and terrorism in the name of a nebulous ‘truth’, and thus echo the very mental strategies of al-Qaida. But they also make available narratives of meaning that illuminate the realities of power which imprison the world. Should their consumers be alarmed or amused? Read the rest of this post...
A wary platform encounter with a self-styled spiritual warrior offers unexpectedly renewed hope to a weary Omair Ahmad. Read the rest of this post...
In the aftermath of a cancer operation, inveterate sceptic and openDemocracy columnist Dave Belden is treated by a healer. Might his sickness really have roots in his childhood? Can she address its cause at the level of ‘energy’? If so, what else might she heal? Is she a cheap gypsy or the real thing? What does he believe? Read the rest of this post...
The addictions to bad news and to boosterism are alike protections from reality. One encourages cynicism, the other complacency; both evade responsibility for the world’s horror. For Dave Belden, it has been a long road to global optimism. But in the wake of the avalanche of violence and grief in the Iraq war, he wonders if giving up TV is a condition of sustaining long-term hope for the planet. Read the rest of this post...
The trouble with close-knit groups, according to psychiatrist Arthur Deikman, is that they stop thinking realistically. Is this true of the Bush team? Could this Iraq war be Bush’s Bay of Pigs, rather than his Cuban missile crisis? Read the rest of this post...
Radical dreamers, often religious, have shaped today’s democracies. In a fundamentalist age like ours, how can we be inspired by them without falling foul of their totalitarian tendencies? Read the rest of this post...
In the interests of democracy and wealth creation, we need both Davos and Porto Alegre, and we need them to work together. Read the rest of this post...
Where Dave Belden lives, the computer has put every home, school, neighbourhood in close encounter with fantasies of power, violence, and lust. Should we fortify our minds, or learn how to live freely amongst darkness? Read the rest of this post...
As traditional societies cross the bridge to modernity, is their encounter with the globalised world bound to erupt in religious conflict? Or is there another way across? Read the rest of this post...
Returning to openDemocracy after his father’s funeral, Dave Belden salutes his positive outlook and sturdy belief, before engaging in his readers’ earlier responses. Read the rest of this post...
In dialogue with Dave Belden, one Muslim Indian living in America voices the optimism of a rising generation. In an atmosphere of freedom to speak the truth, and despite political oppression in Islamic states and secularist pressures in the west, Muslims are making progress by changing from within the faith. Read the rest of this post...
A young Dutch woman of Somali origin is in deep trouble for criticising Islam. To a writer formed within a tight religious community, her travails reveal a chasm where our understanding of the connections between religion, freedom and democracy should be. Dave Belden fuses the personal and political to illuminate a key contest of the new century: not left vs right, but multicultural vs universal. Read the rest of this post...
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