News & Ideas

Friday's News & Ideas - 10/20/2023

  • Media filled with hateful language
  • Jewish sites increase security
  • Conflict in Gaza is not a religious war
  • Nun tackles environmental activist
  • Forcing unwed mothers into adoption
  • Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s writing

Right-wing media is flooded with dehumanizing rhetoric against Palestinians
HuffPost: Media experts say normalizing this kind of hateful language can have major — even deadly — consequences.
Religion News Service: Palestinian Americans decry demonization in media amid rising fear of hate crimes

‘A lot of pain’: Europe’s Jews fear rising antisemitism after Hamas attack
The Guardian: Protection of Jewish sites has been increased in towns and cities across Europe after the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas.

Israel-Hamas is not a religious war and this is not your rapture
Religion Dispatches: A portion of the Christian Right in the U.S. cannot help but make the murder of Israelis and Palestinians about them and their religious ideas.

A video of a Catholic nun tackling someone went viral. What made things turn violent?
Deseret News: A video that spread rapidly on social media shows a French nun tackling an environmental activist

For decades, churches forced unwed mothers into adoptions
Sojourners: When Francine Gurtler gave birth at age 15, she felt like she lost her voice. Gurtler lived at an Episcopal home for unwed mothers and said the workers of the home coerced her into placing her baby for adoption.

The Spark

Revisiting Yeshayahu Leibowitz
The late Israeli thinker spoke of the occupation’s moral cost for both sides of the conflict, JSTOR says.

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