An excerpt
Back in the 20th century, most Western politicians and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life; faith was largely treated as an irrelevance in foreign policy. Symptomatically, State Department diaries ignored Muslim holidays until the 1990s. In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God's name; and money and volunteers have poured into these regions. Once again, one of the world's great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants). And once again zealotry seems all too relevant to foreign policy: America would surely not have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and be thinking so actively of striking Iran) had 19 young Muslims not attacked New York and Washington.
1 comment:
"But the line is not always easy to draw: this paper disapproves of publicly financed faith schools, especially ones that discriminate against non-believers, but it also believes in giving poor parents more choice—and in American cities the main alternative to public schools is Catholic ones."
My course on the First Amendment just finished the section on government funding of religious institutions. Just to clarify, as it is not very clear from that excerpt, that school vouchers can be used for any private school and the government can not prevent parents from choosing religious schools. The quote seems to imply that the government is saying one thing on paper but doing another, but (in this case at least) that is not the case at all. It would actually be unconstitutional for the government to prevent those vouchers from going to non-religious schools because it is promoting "non-religion" and still telling people what to believe. Separation of church and state, as the courts see it, is not only separating religion from state, but it also means that the government can not tell you NOT to believe in religion.
Anyways, I didn't like how the article talked about Turkey and how the author kept referring to Islamism. But you already know how I feel about that :)
Otherwise, good article.
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