Culture

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities. Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?

On February 20, 2012 several American soldiers, five having been identified as responsible at this point, took some Islamic writings including several copies of the Koran to a landfill on Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where they were burned. As soon as Afghan workers on the scene realized that Korans were being burned, they recognized what was happening as an act of desecration, and launched an immediate protest. The protest spread rapidly throughout the country, and turned violent, producing at least 30 Afghan deaths, as well as five dead American soldiers that also produced many non-lethal casualties.

By Scilla Elworthy who speaks with Archbishop Desmond Tutu A TalkWorks Films Special www.talkworks.info Two peace prize laureates in conversation for TalkWorks about the question of nuclear weapons, disarmament and peace. St John’s College, Oxford, Saturday May 9 2010

Between them the Arab Spring and Boko Haram of northern Nigeria are doing a good job of putting Sharia law on the map. These two extremes in fact show dramatically how Sharia interpretations can vary from destructive madness as in Nigeria to calm accommodation, even liberalism, as in Tunisia. Sharia law is not only a legacy of Mohammed – he only devoted a handful of pages in the Koran to the dos and don’ts of moral life. Much comes from the Hadith, the collection of thoughts and sayings from the first couple of centuries after Mohammed’s death. Much of the Hadith is even more remote from the central text and Mohammed than some of the reflections of St Paul and the final chapter of the New Testament, the Apocalypse of John, are from Jesus and the Gospels. Boko Haram, with its bombings, appears to be causing mayhem, drawing support in...

Alfàs del Pi, Spain The church was not as overfilled as it used to be for midnight mass on Christmas eve.  But the ritual unfolded as it has done for centuries, around John 3:16 “little bible”, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.  And the priest spoke about two parallel Christmases, one spiritual, of the bible, and one material with gifts, food, and licores. Could there also be two parallel Jesuses, one the Christ, and the other a revolutionary, fighting the Roman Empire and its client elite in the province conquered in 63bC?  Matthias Schulz (Der Spiegel 17 2011) has theologians and historians elaborate that thesis, leaning toward the revolutionary Jesus, disturbingly similar to his look-alike and act-alike Che Guevara two millennia later, also fighting an empire, also killed by...

By Jonathan Power Even if sublimated an abiding fear among Western watchers of the Arab Spring is that the dictators’ successors in power will be militant Islamists who once elected will stop at nothing, even violence, to stay in power. A decade ago when Islamists won an election in Algeria the US and France were visibly happy that the secular-orientated military stepped in and annulled the election. The Western powers would not support such a move today, but anxiousness about the Islamists will remain. But why?