{"id":258,"date":"2011-04-05T16:37:51","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T20:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=258"},"modified":"2011-04-05T16:37:51","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T20:37:51","slug":"when-korans-are-burned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/when-korans-are-burned.html","title":{"rendered":"When Korans are burned"},"content":{"rendered":"

What to do about people burning Korans? Lindsay Graham’s idea<\/a> of restricting First Amendment rights seems to have gone over like a lead balloon, and good riddance to it–though it’s tempting to wish an evil end to the whole cast of characters, from Terry Jones<\/a> to Hamid Karzai<\/a> to the rioters<\/a> in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

As for the news media, in the world of internet self-promotion, eschewing coverage of such events counts for little, at least when it’s someone like Jones, who has already won his 15 minutes of fame, and can’t wait for another 15. But as long as we’re in the democracy-promotion business, I say it’s time to make clear throughout the world just what the American Constitution protects: the right to build a mosque just as much as the right to burn a Koran. Or a Bible. Or an American flag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What to do about people burning Korans? Lindsay Graham’s idea of restricting First Amendment rights seems to have gone over like a lead balloon, and good riddance to it–though it’s tempting to wish an evil end to the whole cast of characters, from Terry Jones to Hamid Karzai to the rioters in Afghanistan. As for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Korans are burned - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/when-korans-are-burned.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Korans are burned - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What to do about people burning Korans? Lindsay Graham’s idea of restricting First Amendment rights seems to have gone over like a lead balloon, and good riddance to it–though it’s tempting to wish an evil end to the whole cast of characters, from Terry Jones to Hamid Karzai to the rioters in Afghanistan. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}