religion

Random House canceled publication of a novel purporting to depict the early life of the Prophet Muhammad and his child bride, Aisha.

Excerpts from Sherry Jones's The Jewel of Medina do not make it sound like fiction worthy of the novel's latest defender, Salman Rushdie. Denise Spellberg, an Islamic historian who reviewed the manuscript, called it "soft-core pornography," and "ugly" porn at that. Consider a first-person passage from Aisha, who, according to some traditions, married Muhammad at age 6 and had sex with him at 9:

This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It's always painful the first time.

Novelist Thomas M. Disch killed himself in his New York apartment on July 5.

Endzone, Disch's blog, was one of the Web's cheeriest and one of its darkest. It derived its cheer from a reckless, desperate wit, often expressed by ridiculing, lampooning, or harassing enemies and professional associates who had crossed him. The ancient blogger wisdom about counting to a thousand before posting a personal attack seemed not to have reached him, and the effect was amusing and bracing. When an editor at FSG rejected an introduction he had written to the poems of Allen Tate, Disch responded with a short verse-cycle, childish and pissy, denouncing the editor, quite unfairly, by name. (Disch could write well about other people's poetry, but he was an eccentric choice for a Tate introduction.)

On his radio show, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson accused Barack Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible" and promoting a "lowest common denominator of morality."

On the face of it, Dobson's comments seem like a bizarre overreaction to a two-year-old Obama speech, in which he argued for a progressive politics more accommodating to religious believers while taking some (relatively gentle) jabs at religious conservatives. It's easier to understand Dobson's outburst, though, in the context of events like Obama's recent off-the-record meeting with evangelical leaders, after which one attendee wrote that Obama "came across as thoughtful and much more of a 'centrist' than what I would have expected," and added that while he would be voting for McCain, he wouldn't be surprised if the 2008 race were "the first time a majority of evangelicals will vote for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter."

At Tim Russert's Kennedy Center memorial, members of the Westboro Baptist Church picketed and held placards cursing the beloved Meet the Press host for his Catholicism and tolerance of homosexuality.

Something tells me that today, as hundreds weep not two hundred yards from my office, is not the day to say something nice about the most reviled family in America. But when is the day? Every year, the followers of the Reverend Fred Phelps protest hundreds of funerals -- mostly the funerals of soldiers -- and each set of mourners deserves better that to have anti-gay fanatics waving signs denouncing them as "fags" and "fag-enablers" (a category that apparently captures everyone but the Westboro members themselves). The bereaved Russerts certainly do. I sympathize with the woman who stopped her car and asked a passerby to run over and snatch away the "Russert in Hell" sign. But if we must choose one funeral as an occasion to rectify the public's ignorance of the Phelpses' bizarre history, it might even seem fitting that the occasion would be the death of a man recognized as an emblem of truth-seeking and setting records straight.

Jeremiah Wright's recent media blitz has complicated Barack Obama's efforts to secure the Democratic presidential nomination.

To describe Jeremiah Wright as charismatic is to understate his extraordinary magnetism, which drew Barack Obama to Christianity twenty years ago. Sure, Wright is a divisive figure, but he's a uniter as well -- embracing gays and lesbians as well as militant Black Muslims, and building a kind of rainbow coalition of the excluded, which inspired Obama (and countless others) to go forth and perform good works. In turning on his pastor, Obama claims that Wright has changed. Could it be that Obama has changed?

In a surprise move, Pope Benedict XVI met with a group of victims of sexual abuse behind closed doors in Washington D.C.

It was a small but important step. Pope John Paul II was famous for his public-relations savvy, his ability to turn the media's fascination with the papal office to his advantage, but in the sexual abuse scandal his successor has shown the defter touch. In his waning years, the previous Pope seemed to lack an appreciation for how deep the rot and outrage went, and the Vatican behaved as though the scandal had more to do with American media sensationalism than with the Catholic hierarchy's own sins. Whereas both as Cardinal and now as Pope, the soft-spoken German-born Joseph Ratzinger has been more forthright than his predecessor about the "filth" in the priesthood and more active in response -- and now, in his first trip to the United States since being elevated to the See of Peter, more willing to make the scandal a touchstone for his ministry, both in public and in private.

The United House of Prayer for All People (TUHOPFAP) interred its charismatic leader, "Precious Daddy" Samuel C. Madison, today in Washington, D.C.

In Washington, this is a week of two Christian passages: Pope Benedict XVI's celebration of his 81st birthday, and the burial of Bishop S. C. Madison, leader of TUHOPFAP for seventeen years. One of the largest and most powerful of the "black holiness churches," TUHOPFAP is known for its street brass bands, cheap and delicious soul food, and mass outdoor baptisms, which involve fire-hoses and huge tanks of water imported from the River Jordan. This morning, members packed TUHOPFAP's D.C. church, known as "God's White House," to bury Bishop Madison and mourn his passing. Many of the women wore white -- a sign, perhaps, of the celebratory mood that the church seems incapable of casting off, even at the somber farewell to its beloved leader. In the cafeteria, Saint's Paradise ("Where our Main Ingredient is Love"), no one cried into his grits, and the church's signature brass piped its music, major-key, in over the intercom. But a question remains: Who will lead the Church next?

After his prediction of an imminent Doomsday turned out to be wrong, the leader of the Russia's True Orthodox Church tried to kill himself by smacking his head with a log.

Pyotr Kuznetsov has endured crude and unwarranted ridicule -- unwarranted not only because he is a troubled man, but also because messiahs do this sort of thing all the time. To entertain self-doubt, to supplicate miserably to the higher power that sent you, to act, in moments of extreme stress, in ways that seem undignified -- these are occupational hazards of being the Son or prophet of God. Kuznetsov's self-battery is a normal stage of religious genesis.

Two prominent Catholic conservatives have endorsed Barack Obama for President.

The differences between the arguments that Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich have deployed to explain their support for Obama speaks volumes about how hard it is to generalize about Catholic conservatives, let alone Catholics as a whole. MORE

The Kingdom of Bhutan, for over a hundred years an absolute monarchy under the Wangchuk Dynasty, held its first elections.

"All things," Lord Buddha reminds us, "are ephemeral." The two Buddhist autocrats who saw their power eroded this week in South Asia might have kept this advice in mind. From his Dharmasala lair, His Holiness the Dalai Lama lamented helplessly as the violent protests in Lhasa -- and the crackdown by Beijing -- proceeded apace, not obviously affected by his pleas for calm. And Jigme Khesar Namgyel, son of the Scourge of Thimpu, watched his subjects vote for a national assembly for the first time, in a ballot he himself decreed, but that still diminishes his authority. MORE

Arthur C. Clarke, the celebrated science fiction novelist, died earlier today.

Clarke was best known for anticipating the advent of telecommunication satellites and for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted by Stanley Kubrick into one of the most innovative and well-regarded films of all time. But more than that, Clarke was a dissenter, a cosmopolitan visionary who saw conventional patriotism and religious belief as a dangerous plague; only by doing away with both, he ofted argued, could humanity reach its full potential.

Video emerged of Barack Obama's pastor's saying that the U.S. invited the September 11 attacks with its support for state terrorism abroad.

Ever since the rise of the religious right, conservative politicians have attempted a delicate two-step with conservative Christianity's more extreme elements, simultaneously welcoming their support and keeping their more outlandish positions at arm's length. Now it's Barack Obama's turn to try the same trick -- except that the extremist in question is the pastor of his church, a spiritual mentor, and the man who married him and baptized his children. MORE

Newspapers reported that Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, an official in the Vatican office that oversees confession and conscience, had listed seven new "social sins" of the modern world.

Now that the very idea of sin and penitence seems hopelessly Old Europe, the earnest moral language of Catholicism -- sin, virtue, evil, salvation -- lends itself easily to caricature. The bishop gave an interview early this month, and by Monday, journalists had distilled his thoughts into tabloid headlines: "Seven new deadly sins: are you guilty?" and "Pope Identifies Seven New Sins!" The articles claimed Girotti's ad-hoc list expanded or even (in more grievous misinterpretations) replaced the familiar litany of deadly sins -- pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth -- codified by Pope Gregory the Great in the late 6th Century, fine-tuned by Aquinas in the 13th, and popularized by Dante in the 14th. But even those seven were less "sins" than categories of impropriety, attitudes that could lead to spiritually destructive personal behavior. MORE

At the request of the Harvard Islamic Society, Harvard University has created female-only exercise hours at one of its athletic facilities, so that Muslim women don't have to work out alongside men.

The argument about how Western societies — from universities to nation-states — should accommodate their Muslim inhabitants tends, for the moment, to break down along the pre-existing left-right lines of partisan debate. The liberal administrators who granted the Harvard Islamic Society's request no doubt viewed it as an innocuous and reasonable gesture, and a case study in how multiculturalism ought to work. Critics of such accommodations, meanwhile, tend to be right-wingers fretting about creeping shari'a, and the possibility that multiculturalism's tendency to buckle under pressure from aggrieved minorities who reject its premises entirely is paving the way for the Islamification of the West.

The Scottish parliament is considering a pardon for Helen Duncan, the last woman jailed under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

Some initiatives -- such as this pardon -- have merit, even though their proponents are groups that exist in part to support those who have "experienced poltergeist activity." Helen Duncan spent nine months in the clink because she predicted the sinking of a British ship (an act of clairvoyance made admittedly less impressive by the fact that it was 1944, and British ships had U-boats snapping at their keels). MORE

The Pew Forum released its "Religious Landscape Survey," which offers a detailed look at the way we worship -- or don't -- at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

By law, the U.S. census doesn't ask about religious belief. Fortunately, the Pew Forum has stepped into the breach.

The survey depicts a nation where Christianity still dominates, but is in decline. Only fifty-one percent of Americans identify themselves with Protestantism, long the nation's dominant creed. Roman Catholicism's share is holding steady (at around twenty percent of the population), but the Catholic numbers are kept afloat by immigration rather than institutional strength; the report notes that the Catholic Church "has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes" over the last twenty years.

Catholic and Protestant decline has coincided with the rise of the religiously unaffiliated, whose numbers have more than doubled in a decade-and-a-half. Being unaffiliated isn't necessarily the same as being an unbeliever. Many Americans who don't identify with any particular faith presumably retain spiritual beliefs of one sort or another. But what's long made America exceptional among developed nations is the strength of organized religion, and it appears that strength is weakening -- perhaps because religion is increasingly identified with politics, or perhaps for some more mysterious reason known to God alone.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has called the eventual adoption of some form of shari'a law for British Muslims "inevitable."

A chorus of critics has since condemned the Archbishop, the eccentric prelate some wags affectionately refer to as "the ArchDruid." But is it self-evidently true that Islamic law is incompatible with modernity, or that a liberal state can't embrace some forms of religious law? Consider India, where the formidably titled Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 was seen as a landmark in minority rights. As in many countries, Indian family law is determined in part by religious boards -- for Christians, Parsis, Hindus, and Muslims -- that draw on and interpret faith traditions to adjudicate disputes. The system is by no means universally popular. Many Hindu chauvinists oppose Muslim personal law in an effort to denigrate a minority they see as a fifth column. Some secular liberals oppose it on grounds that a liberal state demands a uniform civil code. Then there Muslims who want to see Muslim personal law revised in response to changing social norms. And that, difficult though this may be to believe, is well within the Islamic tradition. Shari'a has historically evolved in response to local conditions and cultural traditions, and one would assume the same would be true of a shari'a for British Muslims. By bringing these practices into the light of day, by forcing the women and men who embrace Islamic law to take part in wide-ranging public discussion, we'd bring members of hidebound, isolated communities into the light of liberal modernity.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement and spiritual icon of the last several decades, has died in the Netherlands.

Was he a cult leader?  The Maharishi's army of consciousness-expanders regards him with the slavish devotion, and they impute powers to his teaching that bear no relation to reality.  "Yogic flying," one of several cases in which TM supposedly lets practitioners suspend physical laws, closely resembles hopping around on a mat, not "flying" in any common use of the word.  The much vaunted claim that TM caused violent crime to drop in the District of Columbia by 18% is total hooey.

Meditation does seem to yield real and impressive effects for many who practice it, but the Maharishi demanded dangerous levels credulity -- specifically, faith in his own status as the exclusive fount of spiritual knowledge.  Nor was he entirely forthright with his followers (some of whom quit their jobs and moved to Iowa) about his intention of using TM to introduce them to an intense variety of Hinduism.  He was, in short, a domineering religious megalomaniac who tricked good people into dropping everything and following him.  If he wasn't a cult leader, he was certainly getting there.

An Afghan court sentenced journalism student Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for downloading and distributing an article calling Muhammad a "killer and adulterer."

And US college students think they have it rough when caught downloading illegally.   By now, what rankles most about these calls for death sentences -- for naughty novels, misnamed teddy-bears, scandalous downloads -- is not just that they happen, but that the weird-beards of radical Islam have made them seem routine.  Is every act of violence and religious perversity capable of seeming normal through repetition?  How frightening to think that we might be subject to this inuring effect, if the same courts decided to enforce, say, the rules concerning slavery in the Koran.  To compensate for this creeping change in the terms of the argument, we defenders of heresy need to escalate our denunciations each time an atrocity like this is likely to happen.  Regrettably, the denunciations have instead become quieter and less impassioned instead.