How Religion Can Be Used to Build a New Future

As William P. Cavanaugh puts it, “the myth of religious violence is inextricably bound up with the legitimation of the state and its use of violence.” In other words, if we lay the blame solely at religion’s feet, we’re letting politics, empire, and the private sector go unchecked for their roles in war, conquest, and other atrocities. The “religio... See more

I want us to resist absolutist or binary claims about religion (ie: “Religion is violent!” “Religion caused all the major wars in the world!”) that release other agents of power from their accountability in the world’s problems.

These important distinctions about religion offer a real challenge to how we see other cultures and their traditions. If we’re only seeing them through our eyes, rather than challenging our gaze, how can they ever trust us to see them for who they are? How does this imposition of “religion” onto other cultures contribute to broader misunderstanding... See more

some of our commonly held “wisdoms” around religion are missing crucial context, and in the process, are letting many nefarious forces in this world go unchecked and under-examined. In addition, some of these talking points and universal claims about religion are unintentionally reproducing notions of othering, racism, and Western supremacy—even th... See more

Religion is just one category of power that is animating our world. In the fight for reproductive justice, for example, religion is accompanied by capitalism (a system reinforced by the traditional family unit and household), sexism (the belief that women’s bodily autonomy should not be determined by women themselves), and the state (which benefits... See more