Social location determines how one reads a text. This truism is amply illustrated by the different readings Native Americans and Euro-Americans bring to the Hebrew Bible’s conquest narratives. These dissimilar interpretive positions offer evidence of latent attitudes of colonialism even in the twenty-first century. This article employs Mikail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue and “outsidedness” to suggest a way forward in establishing a rapprochement between Euro-Americans and Native Americans (as well as other peoples who have been subjected to the negative forces of Western neo-colonialism).

This paper suggests that the Westminster Confession of Faith’s provisions about church and state, revised in Philadelphia at the start of the Constitution’s ratifying convention, furnished much of the syntax and vocabulary for the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Recognizing the cultural links between the new American government and the Presbyterian Church, the author argues that it was natural for the founders to look to how the new Westminster Confession situated church and state. The author argues that Fisher Ames’s proposed wording for the First Amendment won immediate adoption because it resonated with the Confession, standing as it did in that culture for unity and good sense.

Focusing on the use of Marian imagery from Medjugorje during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), and employing R. Scott Appleby’s use of the concept, sacred ambivalence, this essay will examine how a religious image proclaiming peace can also support violence and war. It will show that a Croat nationalist ideology at work during the war interpreted Mary’s peace through a hermeneutic of violence, where violence was necessary to restore peace – defined under this ideology as a landscape of political, religious, and cultural homogeneity.

Fethullah Gülen is one of the most influential Muslim scholars in the world. His philosophy of combining Islam and modernity, together with religious tolerance, has attracted millions of followers who have established hundreds of educational and cultural institutions all over the world. Influenced by Sufi masters and contemporary Turkish Muslim scholar, Said Nursi, Gülen puts spirituality in the center of everything. While he is a prominent advocate of interreligious dialogue and an admired religious leader, he has been accused by some secularists of being a fundamentalist with a hidden agenda to apply sharia law to Turkey and by religious fundamentalists for compromising religion. Gülen rejects these claims pointing to his past and current activities.

Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), the rejection of sexualized bodily display has been institutionalized and dogmatized, reflecting a gendered paradigm in which modesty functions as a necessary element in members’ temporal (hetero-) sexual practices, and in broader beliefs about the nature of the afterlife. Through a pervasive bureaucratic communicative model, Latter-day Saints are socialized to internalize and appropriate both Church dogma and Church-sanctioned standards of modesty, normalizing both temporal and eternal gender-based roles. Using LDS primary sources, I demonstrate the ubiquity of institutionalized messages on the body and sexuality, and the relationship of these concepts to LDS cosmology that serves as the institutional justification for the clear demarcation of gender roles and the division of gendered power. Through an emic understanding of the meaning of modesty, I argue that the normalization of modesty and chastity through immersive socialization acts to enforce the patriarchy of not only the temporal Church hierarchy but of Mormon concepts about eternity.