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Discrimination on the Taxpayer’s Dime? The Fight To Curtail the Overreach of RFRA

By Sarah Posner

…millions of dollars worth of federal contracts each year, is objecting to new proposed regulations under an Executive Order, amended by President Obama in July 2014, to bar all federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sex or gender identity. These new regulations will apply across all government agencies and will affect a wide range of contracts the government has with faith-based providers. The USCCB argues that denying a faith-ba…

“You Lie!”: Messing with American Mass

By Ben Brazil

…a long way towards explaining the outrage felt by legislators and by many Americans. The president was not speaking to a labor union in Ohio or to teachers in Florida—he was speaking to a joint session of Congress, a ritualized setting that invokes all the sacredness of the democratic government of the United States of America. Americans tend to watch such speeches together—as families, in restaurants, in bars. For a few moments, a significant po…

The Myth of ‘Voodoo’: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti

By Dianne M. Stewart

…d’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou beliefs and practices aside, I am befuddled by Robertson’s lack of reflection on what his tall tale of Haiti’s unpaved road to hell inevitably registers about the nature of the Christian God. Where was the almighty Christian God when Haiti’s founding patriots and defenders of human liberty allegedly “swore a pact to the devil?” There is something…

Resisting the “New Normal” of Parasitic Capitalism in the Two Americas: The Religious Imperative

By Peter Laarman

…sion, it will surely give others permission to find their voices. Create a new set of Values Voters instead of trolling for Values Voters whose “values” merely reflect fear, insecurity, and xenophobia: Here is where things could get interesting. The Right, including the Religious Right, has brilliantly persuaded millions of hard-pressed American workers to substitute warfare against “culture elites” for rebellion against their actual class oppress…

Christian Nationalism is Authentically Christian — And According to a New Poll Most White Evangelicals are Supporters

By Chrissy Stroop

…“A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” divides Americans into Christian nationalism adherents, sympathizers, skeptics, and rejecters using an index derived from their agreement or disagreement—and the strength of their agreement or disagreement—with the following Christian nationalist statements: The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation. U.S. laws should be b…

Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

By Mandy Van Deven

…of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence the glossary in the back. But yeah, there are footnotes. For someone not well-versed in Jewish feminist theory, how transgressive or radical are these essays? Some of them push the envel…

David Becomes Christian at Values Voter Summit

By Daniel Schultz

…hat’s an equally powerful narrative held by many people, most notably the “new Atheists.” It has its ups and downs and its own particular reading of American history, starting with all those deistic founding fathers. While I’m not here to critique the TMST, as Gorski calls it, I will say that it seems inadequate to the task of overcoming the CART. In fact, the two only seem to fuel one another by buying into mutual resentment and hostility. I don’…

The Islamophobia Election: How “Muslim” Became a Racial Identity

By Michael Schulson

…to participate in interviews, and I had a much harder time getting Muslim American men. I found that there’s a lot of self-surveillance. American Muslims are surveilled by the state. They’re surveilled by private citizens. Then they participate in self-surveillance as well. When you’re hyper-surveilled you monitor what you say and do to avoid bringing suspicion onto your body. When you’re on a state list that’s very disempowering. When I got men…

In Qur’an Burning We’re All Losers

By Julie Ingersoll

…Hindu” by Prema Kurien. Yet the aftermath of 9/11 has made the process of Americanization different for American Muslims. What, months ago, Sarah called the utter ordinariness of demeaning Islam has turned into full-blown, ugly bigotry (and that includes both Qur’an burnings as well as efforts around the country to prohibit the building of mosques). Today my friend and colleague Parvez Ahmed, who has, himself, been attacked by anti-Muslim activis…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…such nonsense. But in studies like this one, Phrenology’s back again in a new form, implying this time that the size of the brain is any indicator of human intelligence. We’ve all been told countless times that the human brain is a highly redundant organ, and that each of us uses only a fraction of it in normal circumstances. Given that established scientific truism, it would be passing strange if brain size bore any relation to intelligence. An…