Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
International
Posted inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism
Reading Time: 7 minutes When writing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Hindu extremism, I committed the cardinal sin of not defining a key term: fascism. This was a conscious choice, because I’ve written before on how quickly we mire ourselves in political word games. Better to start with the government figure that Western media keeps centering, as […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inSpace
Can we still make peace in space?
Reading Time: 6 minutes What a year for symbols of peace and progress. On Thursday, April 7, the UN General Assembly removed Russia from the Human Rights Council on which it had sat for weeks while displacing 10 million Ukrainians, internally and abroad. In the inadequacy of an international organization formed after World War II to sustain peace among […]
Posted inCulture
Fighting exploitation in the Amazon calls for new alliances…even with missionaries
Reading Time: 5 minutes An ounce of gold is currently worth almost twice as much as an ounce of cocaine. That reality has changed the funding formula for guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Venezuela and Colombia. Where narcotrafficking once brought in the lion’s share of resources for groups like ELN and dissident FARC, two heavily-armed movements that occupy densely […]
Posted inCulture
Addressing Palestinian suffering is hard, so the world plays word games
Reading Time: 6 minutes On February 1, 2022, Amnesty International released a report identifying the current situation in Israel and Palestine as “apartheid,” a term most commonly associated with South Africa’s political system of racial stratification until 1994. The full title goes further, calling the region’s state of affairs a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity.” The […]
Posted inEnvironment
Oil imperialism and the struggle for human control over our futures
Reading Time: 4 minutes In March 2020, something unsettling transpired in the global economy. Okay, a few somethings. But while most of the world remembers the sweeping COVID-19 lockdowns, what happened between Saudi Arabia and Russia around oil production is not common knowledge. And yet, as Vladimir Putin has launched a military invasion of Ukraine, we cannot forget the […]
Posted inPolitics
Religion and the Ukraine conflict
Reading Time: 3 minutes We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic with our civilization in peril due to a changing climate. Much of the discussions of the day focus on the viciously tribal groups that are all vying for (often artificially-) limited resources. Now we have to deal with all the Washington drama that comes with […]
Posted inCulture, News
Adorable Satan Statue Makes Spanish Town Freak Out
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Spanish city of Segovia we have yet another instance of this kind of over-ambitious attempt to keep the demonic at bay by attacking an innocent and wholly not religiously inspired statue.