Archive for the ‘public policy’ tag
Obama’s Middle East Speech: Religious Leaders Respond
by Jaweed Kaleem
from HuffingtonPost
Religious leaders are responding to President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech on the Middle East, in which the president said that “all faiths must be respected” and suggested “bridges be built among them.”
Much of the sweeping speech addressed political and economic issues in light of recent democratic movements in the majority-Muslim region. Obama promised U.S. support for democracy, human rights and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But Obama, who famously addressed the Muslim world from Cairo University in two years ago in a speech focused on Islam, also discussed religion several times in Thursday’s comments.
“We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders — whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran,” Obama said in the hour-long speech.
Globalization, Religious Change and the Common Good
by R. Scott Appleby in the Journal of Religion, Conflict and Peace
While hardly new in world politics, religion has returned in force to the international agenda. The Shi‘ite revolution in Iran (1978-1979) and the political awakening of the New Christian Right in the early eighties in the United States roughly coincided. Both events surprised journalists and politicians who bought in to a version of the secularization thesis and therefore underestimated or ignored the enduring power of religion to mobilize protest movements. The nineties saw the increasing prominence of Hamas (Sunni), Hezbollah (Shi‘ite), and Gush Emunim (Jewish) in shaping the conflict in the Middle East, the electoral and cultural successes of militant Hindu nationalism in India, and the spread of Sunni Muslim radicalism, Al-Qaeda style, in parts of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Yet the U.S. government was slow to respond effectively to situations where religion played a major role. Even after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, it was commonplace to hear U.S. officials describe the Ayatollah’s revolution as fundamentally a secular movement—a socio-economic protest cloaked up in pseudo-religious wrappings. There is perhaps no more eloquent testimony to the secular bias that has distorted U.S. foreign policy than the fact that the word “religion” does not appear in the index Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger’s encyclopedic account of American statesmanship, published in 1994. Nor does it appear in the index to Paul Collier’s recent book about world poverty, The Bottom Billion, despite the fact that many of the conflicts involving religious actors occur in underdeveloped countries.
Breakthrough Summit on Women’s Rights in Melbourne
The International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) has organized a Breakthrough summit in Melbourne 2-3 Dec. which will coincide with the opening of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, writes The Age newspaper. Among the summit’s presenters, Sister Joan Chittister, a major speaker at the Parliament, will argue that “if the faith communities brought their faith to bear on public policy we would change the world overnight,” and the article broadly discusses the role of faiths in addressing injustices. The Parliament welcomes the IWDA’s efforts, with Executive Director Dirk Ficca praising the summit as model parliaments present and future.
To read the full article, click here.
