The teachings of Islam and the Indonesian constitution clearly prohibit interfaith marriage. However, some Muslim communities in North Sulawesi as a minority group have entered into interfaith marriages. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the phenomenon of interreligious marriage in North Sulawesi and the achievement of minority fiqh objectives in interfaith families. This research is a field research that uses qualitative methods with a phenomenological approach. Data collection was conducted through interviews with informants consisting of 5 interfaith marriage actors, 1 (...) village official, and 1 religious leader. The results showed that the main motivation for interfaith couples to marry is mutual love. They also tend to get support from their respective extended families so that the marriage runs relatively smoothly and safely. The objectives of minority fiqh are achieved in interfaith marriages in the multicultural society of North Sulawesi. Minority fiqh can be an approach in interfaith marriages in multicultural societies where Muslims are a minority, without losing their Islamic essence, it is based on the fiqh rule that changes in law can occur due to changes in times and places. Minority jurisprudence can be an alternative basis for the sustainability of interfaith families in North Sulawesi that are able to maintain their Islamic identity while still respecting their partner's beliefs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.4 (2005) 23-41MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]"With Conscious Artifice" Auden's Defense of MarriageSusannah Young-ah Gottlieb1 "Auden Said That?"The greatest lesson of life comes from Auden—sort of.In Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, a line attributed to Auden forms the lesson around which the "runaway bestseller" revolves. As the first paragraph of the book explains and the last paragraph repeats, (...) the book recounts a pedagogical encounter between Mitch and a retired Brandeis professor of Social Psychology, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of ALS: "The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life" [Albom, 1, 192]. Several years earlier Mitch had written his senior thesis under Morrie's direction. Upon learning of Morrie's condition from an episode of Nightline entitled "Life's Lessons," Mitch visits his dying teacher and finds his own feelings of "confusion and depression" [44] healed under Morrie's tutelage. From the first "class" of their renewed relationship Morrie emphasizes that contemporary culture condemns those under its influence to a "meaningless life" [43] and that the confusion Mitch experiences belongs to the entire era—and so, too, an urgent need for clarity. Mitch, in turn, sees in Morrie someone who, by virtue of his life-affirming wisdom and his proximity to death, can identify those "important things" that can fill the cultural vacuum about which he, as a sports reporter, knows all too well. On the fifth of their unofficial Tuesday "office hours," Morrie begins to fulfill his former student's expectations. Clarity comes in an imperative the old professor attributes to Auden:"Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish.'""Love each other or perish." I wrote it down. Auden said that?[91]The line in question could scarcely be clearer, for it represents life in terms of a stark decision: love or death. Despite the simplicity of this choice, however, the scene is curiously complex, as if Mitch, against his explicit intentions, wants to dampen the effect of Morrie's wisdom. That Mitch writes down the line "Love each other or perish" is itself odd—even more so that he writes that he writes it down. As the beginning of the chapter explains at length, the conversation is being recorded, so that all of Morrie's wisdom may be preserved. The act of writing under these circumstances is less a sign of confidence in the supreme importance of the quotation in question than an indication of a degree of unresolved confusion: "Auden said that?" The confusion in this case cannot be attributed [End Page 23] to contemporary culture; rather, it consists in certain philological problems of citation: is Auden the author of the line, and if so, is it correctly rendered? Perhaps under the direction of another Brandeis professor, Mitch had learned and retained the famous last line of the penultimate stanza of Auden's "September 1, 1939": "We must love one another or die."1 Perhaps Mitch, or his publisher, having done some research, wants to signal an awareness of Morrie's misquotation but nevertheless remain faithful to the exact words of his teacher. And in any case who would care about such matters when something of great importance, indeed "life's greatest lesson," has just been articulated?Mitch's curiously inappropriate question does not, however, altogether disappear from Tuesdays. In response, Morrie does not so much insist on the accuracy of the quotation as on its goodness and truth:"Love each other or perish," Morrie said. "It's good, no? And it's so true. Without love, we are birds with broken wings."Say I was divorced, or living alone, or had no children. This disease—what I'm going through... (shrink)

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; (...) it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women. (shrink)

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In the present article, we discuss Schwinger's winding up his work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, being offered a tenured professorship at Harvard University, getting married, and settling down into a highly productive teaching and research career.

Marriages come in a very wide variety: if the reports of anthropologists and historians are to be believed, an extraordinarily wide variety. This includes some of the more unusual forms, including marriage to the dead; to the gods; and even to plants. This does suggest that few proposed marriage relationships would require 'redefining marriage': but on the other hand, it makes giving a general theory of marriage challenging. So one issue we should face is how accepting we should be of (...) the reports: to what extent reported 'marriages' really are marriages. This paper defends the view that almost all of these reported marriages are in fact marriages, and suggests some theoretical approaches that may be generous enough to account for this. (shrink)

In broad terms, realism, relativism and pluralism can be regarded as the theoretical articulations of the following insights. Realism embodies the sense that what is at stake in our beliefs is something serious, i.e. that there is a fact of the matter, independent from our desire, which is going to decide whether what we believe in is true or not. Relativism, on the other hand, incorporates the realization that our cognitive take on the world is always perspectival, that there is (...) no way to overcome the blind spot which enables the knower to have a world in view at all. Pluralism, finally, draws on the intuition that every human being and every human community cannot fully understand, let alone save themselves, without the help of others’ sense-making efforts. Against the background of Charles Taylor’s philosophy, the core of truth of the above insights will be discussed and arranged to develop an active view of toleration that not only urges us to put up with others, but encourages us to rely on the benefit of coming to terms with different outlooks and ways of life. (shrink)

In Uncivil Unions, Adrian Daub presents a truly interdisciplinary look at the story of a generation of philosophers, poets, and intellectuals who turned away from theology, reason, common sense, and empirical observation to provide a purely ...