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The Trouble With Harry (Potter): Religious Conservatives Do Have Something to Fear - religiondispatches.org
Most progressives clucked their tongues when some Christian conservatives condemned (and tried to censor) the phenomenally successful Harry Potter franchise, which comes to its provisional conclusion this week with the release of the eighth film in the series. There they go again, we thought. Yet while many specific critiques of the series are simply phobic reactions to the presence of witches, wizards, and magic, I think many anti-Potterites may be onto something interesting—even if they’re not aware of it themselves. (Warning: this article contains spoilers galore.)
The final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is, like most of its predecessors, quite faithful to the books. This last film, among the best in the series, is more action-packed and thus less reflective than some of the other installments, but the basic arc of the story remains consistent. Harry Potter, boy wizard, is actually the Chosen One who will, prophesies say, defeat Lord Voldemort, or die trying, or both. As readers of the books have known for some time now, “both” turns out to be the answer. Harry is killed by Voldemort, but, Christ-like, returns from the dead to ultimately vanquish his foe.
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Why 9/11 Changed (Everything) Nothing - Religiondispatches.org
Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing
The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict. In that sense, 9/11 changed nothing. That’s because, to paraphrase Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chris Hedges: war is a force that gives Americans meaning through their history, largely because powerful impulses in American religion have historically sacralized war’s religious, redemptive force.
On May 1, when President Obama announced the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, crowds almost instantly formed outside the White House chanting “USA! USA!.” Depending on whom you believe, this reaction was either an unsettling display of vengeance directed against a relic of Cold War alliances who no longer had much cachet in most of the Arab world, or it was an understandable existential catharsis; a healthy celebration of patriotism that was more about celebrating “us” rather than denigrating “them.”
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Women, Marriage, and Job Opportunity in the Muslim World
Revolution has shaken the Middle East, sending unrest throughout the region. The rhetoric of revolution proclaimed out with the old and in with the new, but only time will tell how deep the social and political changes in Egypt and Tunisia will be. For western onlookers, one burning question is what rights the new governments will accord to women. Will women be included in a new democracy, or will there be a revival of strict fundamentalist law?
The question of women’s rights is not so straight-forward as simply introducing western-style reforms. After all, there is no single, unitary movement for women’s equal rights that unites all women internationally. For example, western onlookers may be confused when Middle Eastern women seemingly embrace fundamentalist values such as wearing the veil.