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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

…potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins. It would make a great, cheesy musical number. Mormons are ideal subjects for musical parody because they have their own homegrown traditions of musical theater. Not counting its uniformed missionaries, the most recognizable Mormon “product” in the religious marketplace is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (“MoTab”), which sp…

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Transforming America’s Israel Lobby

…lled for. It is up to us to give politicians, policymakers, and non-Jewish Americans the confidence that American Jews expect new approaches to the Arab-Israeli conflict and new ways of talking about it. Ending the Silence about Israel and Human Rights “It blows my mind that my Jewish brothers and sisters, who are with me on Darfur, who were with me on South Africa, can’t bend themselves to deal with injustice to the Palestinians,” said Reverend D…

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Pariah or Charmed Hero: America’s Obsession with Jews and Israel

…se he is black. This is the dirty little secret of a certain generation of American Jews. American Jewry has spent so much energy fighting anti-Semitism that it has refused to see racism (including Islamophobia) in its own ranks. Regarding the evangelical Christian Zionists, they won’t vote for Obama as they are the Republican base. So why pander? We should recall that the McCain/Palin ticket has said they would not sit down with the prime ministe…

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Don’t Ignore the Role of “Christian Values” in Conservative Conspiracy

…n voters to stand up to the Illuminati with their votes in support of God, American values and their understanding of the American traditional family. Writing about the culture wars of the late 1960s and of today religion scholar Stephen Prothero observed that: In the contemporary culture wars, the maw of cultural politics opened wide and nearly swallowed civil society whole. Culture warriors continued to fight over religion, family, sexuality, ra…

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Catholic ‘Soul-Searching’ as Ireland Votes on Marriage; Churches, American Activists Join Kenyan Anti-Gay Group’s ‘Family’ Confab; Indian Mom Seeks Spouse For Gay Son; Global LGBT Recap

…or the LGBT community in Jamaica: some claim that homosexuality is a North American import, and thus not part of Jamaican tradition and culture. However, American evangelical churches play a strong role in importing and exacerbating homophobia in Jamaica. Lewis explained that since the 1970s, American evangelical churches have become entrenched in Jamaican society and are no longer viewed as outsiders. In contrast, advocacy on behalf of the human…

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Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

…ch as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Digital Atlas of American Religion—to the narrow—the Hindu American Foundation’s map of Hindus worldwide (with accompanying demographic information comparing “Hindus/Asian/Indian” favorably on various socioeconomic rankings to other racial and nationality categories). Unlike other kinds of maps, maps of American religion must negotiate the difficulty of that term—what counts, what doesn’t,…

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The Brutality of the American Eden

…rily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Beck rants in Twitter-like aphorisms condensing David Barton’s execrable version o…

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American Civil Religion is Dead, Long Live American Civil Religion

…cultures while they are also expected to understand and respect the common American culture; 4. We acknowledge the nobility of the American experiment even as we acknowledge certain “flaws” that God needs to “mend” (in the prayer-hymn wording of Katherine Lee Bates). Now suppose we update this problematic creed for the sake of telling the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is…

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We Were Here Before September 11th

…ou should read, tongue in cheek: white American, because obviously African-Americans are Americans). In fact, the origin of Islam in America is through Muslim slaves brought over hundreds of years ago from Africa. Some estimates are that as many as one third of the slaves brought here from Africa were Muslims. The record is emphatic: royalty, scholars, businessmen, Africans from all walks of life were caught up in the peculiar institution. That so…

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The Racial Politics of Atheism

…at was supposed to be the original site of the Academy Awards.  Post white-flight in the sixties and seventies Inglewood became a predominantly African American community. It now “boasts” an eclectic array of faith institutions from Church of Scientology storefronts to mosques. I think the cover evokes many of the book’s themes about whiteness, innocence and redemption; bringing it full circle to the last chapter which explores the racial politics…

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