Religion Dispatches
…e 2009. I have finally made peace with it. 9/11 is a difficult day for all Americans, and for me as a New Yorker it is one laden with very personal and painful memories. Eid is a joyous day for all Muslims, marking the end of Ramadan, our holy month of fasting, serving others, and seeking God’s forgiveness and blessings; but it is by no means a raucous celebration. Eid is a day of remembrance where we come together with family, friends, and commun…
Read More
…icultural self-education program that has involved trips to the deserts of New Mexico to hang out with farming monks, Portland(ia) to learn “Old World”-style butchery techniques, and have just departed the old sod of New Hampshire again, this time for farming stints in the hills of Turkey and along coastline of the Adriatic. My story bears little resemblance to struggle of the Immokalee workers or the army of poorly-paid farm hands who are the bul…
Read More
…ils, however, Kirk’s novel resonates with much of the current discourse of American religion. The flight of millennial and Zoomer exvangelicals out of churches, the embattled politics of American Christian nationalism, and evangelical attacks on LGBTQ+ rights provide a backdrop for this coming of age story. RD spoke recently with Kirk, a senior editor at The Athletic and co-creator of several popular podcasts, about the book, Christian Nationalism…
Read More
…pin. The stadium rallies provided tableaux of white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and African American men, singing, holding hands, and praying together in a show of Christian male bonding. True, Promise Keepers provided no theological or political critique of structural racism in the United States—racism was deemed a personal sin to be confessed. These attitudes about race found their iconic moment at the 1997 DC rally. When white evangelist J…
Read More
…center driven by real estate, banking, and the stock market. Yes of course New York is the American center of theater, fine art and publishing; but even with these folks the talk is of money, financing, advances, sales figures. The pandemic will change a lot of things about New York City, but not its obsession with money. Of course, I can think of a few complicating factors. The outgoing president is the Emperor of BS, and he is, or was, a New Yor…
Read More
…re extensive literatures on enslaved African Muslims and twentieth century American Black Muslim movements, my next book explores new ground by documenting the prevalence of Orientalist representations of Muslims, Arabs, and Moors in nineteenth century American popular culture in forms such as sheet music, circus performances, minstrelsy and magic. African Americans not only consumed these images, but they helped to create them. For some, Oriental…
Read More
…es from a long historical tradition,” Kidd points out that even before the American Revolution Anglo-Americans were predisposed to hostility towards Muslims. Two elements were chiefly responsible for the hostility: the widespread notion that all Muslims had to be brought to Christianity and the rampant speculations about the End Time that saw Islam as the Antichrist. Humphrey Prideaux’s 1697 book The True Nature of Imposture Fully Displayed in the…
Read More
…. Goldman, American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Esalen Institute, a retreat center formed in 1962 near Big Sur, California, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized prac…
Read More
…e students in mind, particularly those I have taught in courses on African American religious history and religion and race in America. I wanted to engage them with a readable text that offers new theoretical insights about the co-constitution of race and religion in this period and that locates these religious groups, that highlight religious diversity, in a prominent place in the narrative of African American religious history. Are you hoping to…
Read More
…apartheid South Africa, where a notoriously brutal regime that, just like New England, saw itself as a “New Israel,” survived until 1990. This is the darker side of Calvinism that Robinson has seldom if ever discussed, and it would really help her case for Calvinist “liberality” if she could also acknowledge the shadow side. For example, she might consider asking the Irish what they think of Oliver Cromwell’s Christian charity. To my mind it’s Mi…
Read More