June 4, 2015

What’s Happening at IMES this June 2015?

Without question, June is consistently our busiest month of the year at the Institute of Middle East Studies. As such, we wish to highlight a number of the projects that we have been working on as we seek to fulfill our institutional mandate: To bring about positive transformation in thinking and practice […]
May 28, 2015

What Could Christians Learn from the ‘Party of God’?

by Elias Ghazal If you are familiar with the politics of the Middle East, you might be disturbed by the title of this blogpost.  That’s because the Party of God is not some right wing pro-Christian party that serves a Christian cause in the Middle East.  The Party of God […]
May 21, 2015

Faith, Identity and Empire: Ethnic Minorities in Constant Flux

By Rose Khouri Western academia is filled with research on the effects of a colonialist, imperialistic Christianity and its intersection with modern identities. As my colleague Jesse Wheeler alluded to last week, from the native peoples of the modern day United States to the descendants of Africans taken from their […]
May 14, 2015

Demographic Anxieties, Imperial Compromises and the Crucified Messiah

By Jesse Wheeler “The cool thing about Pew numbers is how versatile they are; bloggers can wear them with triumph, grief, & multiple shades of schadenfreude!” – Derek Rishmawy Early April, the Pew Research Center released an in-depth demographic study titled, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050: […]
May 7, 2015

Judeo-Christian-ism Meets Islam-ism

Persian or central Asian illustration showing Mohammed (on the right) preaching By Martin Accad Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders, and others, are inadvertently the spearheads of Islamism in the US and Europe! This may sound like a bit of a radical statement, but perhaps it really isn’t. The situation […]
April 30, 2015

The New Face of ISIS

Things are not always as they seem… A recent article in Spiegel sheds new and significant light on the inner workings of ISIS.  The article is based on documentation discovered in the home of one of the Islamic State’s chief architects—Haji Bakr—a former Colonel in Saddam’s Air Defense Forces—after his […]
April 23, 2015

Prejudice and Its Undoing: Knowing and Loving One Pair of God-Crafted Eyes at a Time

By Ashley al-Saliby How long has it been since anyone has really seen her? I can’t help but wonder her name and her story as I navigate the sidewalk parallel to the one she’s traveling, both of us with market bags in hand. I’m new here, and by “here” I […]
April 16, 2015

Middle East Consultation 2015 – Identity and Belonging in the Middle East & North Africa

The Middle East Consultation 2015 – Discipleship Today: Identity and Belonging in the Middle East & North Africa, 15 – 19 June 2015, will focus on specific opportunities and challenges related to “identity” and “belonging” that face followers of Jesus within the MENA context. These challenges are particularly important given […]