Category Archives: The Scoop

by Richard Flory Although there are still some lingering questions from last November about the role that values-voters played in the midterm elections–for example, were moral issues trumped by personal financial interests?–more recently, a new politics of fear has begun … Continue reading →

Ethnic strife is nothing new in religious communities, but a Los Angeles Times piece about infighting at a local mosque casts more heat than light on the issue. The cops-and-courts story of tensions between Pakistani and Afghan immigrants details a … Continue reading →

by Andrew Khouri For the past few days, Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest nearly three decades of oppressive rule by the autocrat Hosni Mubarak. The protesters have largely been young people without ties to opposition groups or … Continue reading →

by John Adams A few months ago, Al Jazeera gained access to nearly 1,700 confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from someone believed to be in the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department. These “Palestine Papers,” dated from 1999 to 2010, … Continue reading →

by Bethany Firnhaber The second annual Arab Economic Summit came and went last week, along with a missed opportunity for Western journalists to report on the complex political and religious climate in the Middle East. Leaders from across the Arab … Continue reading →

by Jill Krebs It was the case of the news media's putting the politician's foot in his mouth. Alabama's new Gov. Robert Bentley stood before a Baptist congregation earlier this week and said, “Anybody here today who has not accepted … Continue reading →

by Lee Gilmore One of my fellow bloggers has already noted the tacitly required scriptural references and broad civil-religious themes in Obama's widely lauded speech last week at the memorial for the victims of the Tucson shooting. Others have noted … Continue reading →

by Kevin Douglas Grant As the news cycle moves on to other aspects of the Tucson shootings, observers are left wondering what Sarah Palin's foray into Jewish history means for the health of the American political debate. We often hear … Continue reading →

by Jon Dillingham We're long used to the omnipresence of religious language in politics and the emphasis these terms get in the media. Eighty percent of the county identifies as religious and there is not a single member of either … Continue reading →

by Maura Jane Farrelly The Roman Catholic Church's difficult relationship with consumer culture (the realm where “choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth,” according to Pope Benedict XVI) was recently on display when Pepsico … Continue reading →