Tag: religious group
The Law of Worst-Case Scenarios
The present Gaza war, initiated by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, poses important questions about both the morality and laws of war and the language of conflict. People everywhere are having heated conversations involving concepts such as targeting civilians, terrorism, proportionality, and genocide. They deploy these concepts when arguing about broad questions, like whether Hamas’s attacks on civilians are justified resistance, and about narrower ones, like whether a specific Israeli bombing of a refugee camp is justified to … Read more
‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Is a Failure of Representation
Give this to Under the Banner of Heaven, the buzzy true-crime miniseries that recently concluded its run on FX and Hulu: It wastes little time in getting to the point. Minutes into the first episode, Detective Jeb Pyre is interviewing Allen Lafferty in a Utah jail cell. Allen’s wife and daughter have just been brutally murdered by fundamentalist Mormon zealots, and in his grief and anger he unloads on the well-meaning Latter-day Saint detective.
“If you really still believe