Articles

This essay juxtaposes common understandings of secularism and religion to make three main points. First, secularity is a religious phenomenon, incorporating and hiding fundamental Protestant assumptions. Second, religiously motivated violent resistance to the ideology of secularism as it is manifested in American expansion reveals these assumptions and their effects. Third, the conflict between an America engaged in a struggle for global domination and violent resistance to that dominance, both domestically and globally, should be understood as a conflict between two fundamentally opposed religious worldviews. Finally, the essay recommends that public discourse needs to reflect this understanding.

Malaysia consists of two parts, East Malaysia and West Malaysia. East Malaysia sits geographically atop the Island of Borneo (Indonesia) and is divided into two states, Sabah and Sarawak. West Malaysia, across the Java Sea, is also known as Peninsular Malaya and in the north shares a border and a history with Thailand. In 2010, the country of Thailand had a population of 66 million, 87 percent of which is Buddhist and only 3 percent Muslim. The Muslims are mostly at the extreme southern and northern ends of the country. In the northern region, Muslims and Thais co-exist peacefully without conflict; however, in the southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Patani where 80 percent of the people are Muslim and 20 percent Buddhist, conflicts between Muslims, non-Muslims and Buddhist Thais have occurred regularly. This article examines some of the many causes contributing to the conflict in the region, focusing mainly on causes rooted in religion, ethnic identity, and nationalism.

In early August of 2006, one of South Africa’s most notorious apartheid-era leaders, Adriaan Vlok, contacted the Rev.

The present conflict within Israel/Palestine between the Israeli state and Palestinian Arabs living in territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War is often pictured as mirroring a “sibling rivalry” that has been a part of biblical history for centuries. But while the Genesis story of Isaac and Ishmael is painful reading today for anyone sensitive to the emotional well-being of the other, the narratives that have grown up around this story in Judaism and in Islam are markedly different! What constitutes an expulsion within Jewish tradition, and thus evokes a concern for the trauma visited upon Hagar and Ishmael, actually marks the beginnings of the Islamic tradition and is accepted as the action of an unfathomable and all-knowing God/Allah.