social media

When “european_douchebag” posted a photo of a young woman he got more than he bargained for.

Ask a feminist Mormon housewife.

A state that attempts to use the force of law to stop blasphemy must select certain identities for protection to the exclusion of others.

A consciousness change is happening in Syria, a country of twenty-three million that has been brutalized under Martial Law since 1963. My parents left in 1971 with their children, including me, because the repression of civil liberties had already become intolerable. The sense of helpless terror became so ingrained among Syrians that relatives who remained in Syria spoke only in hushed tones and coded words about the brutality of the state—even, incredibly, when they were visiting us in our suburban U.S. home, miles from the reach of any Syrian state police agent.

What the anxious West has failed to recognize in the Arab Spring is that the political transformations of the Middle East are the coming of age of a new Islamism.

Over the past couple years, religionistas of all sorts have attempted to navigate a new media landscape in which old constructions of religious authority, identity, affiliation, and practice are changing almost by the minute.

A roundup of the week’s religion headlines.

Responses to these events that ignore the underlying issues they express—that would see soccer-related violence, like the uprisings this week, simply as ferociously bad manners that can be corrected by cutting off social media access—invite more of the same. Absent religious institutions, soccer grounds, or other outlets as sites for organized repression and/or expression of the powerlessness and hopelessness that characterizes youth culture in places that simmer like East London all over the economically floundering developed world, more such outrage is always just one blind, stupid authoritarian action away.

After Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of evangelical Mars Hill megachurch, asked for stories of “effeminate anatomically male worship leader(s),” he was heavily criticized. But did the evangelical community kiss and make up too quickly?

The Women2Drive movement continues.