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Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

By Katherine Stewart

…e large-scale organizations that successfully planted churches in multiple numbers of New York City’s public schools, and the numbers grew quickly. During the 2010-2011 school year, the Department of Education said 160 congregations were granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to th…

Tea Party, Circa 1930s: A Response to Michael Kazin

By Diane Winston

…ancial calamity. The coalition partners each had their particular motives. Businessmen fretted the bottom line, while religious leaders feared godless Communism. But many saw the overarching threat as one and the same: the New Deal would undo the American way of life predicated on radical individualism, hallowed by Christian teaching, and protected by the political system that had developed in tandem with free-market capitalism. Funded by the head…

What’s Eating Mitt Romney?

By Joanna Brooks

…de the faith. And given that Mormons tend to marry, socialize with, and do business (whenever possible) with other Mormons, I’ve wondered if our community’s social insularity has also played some role in candidate Romney’s unease. Perhaps his lack of ease stems in part from the conservative life choices Mitt made, many according to the directives of his Mormon faith. After all, when Mitt Romney was 19 and 20 years old, he was knocking doors as a p…

No, I Don’t Owe My Yoga Mat to Vivekananda

By Andrea R. Jain

…in the public spectacle of his yoga trances. He later became a fashionable businessman and community leader, but always remained a teacher of yoga. At every stage of Bernard’s yoga career, mainstream Americans remained suspicious of his teachings. He received media attention from all over the country but only attracted a small following made up of those who could afford, both financially and socially, to be eccentric. There were numerous attempts…

The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…his). Better is his subtle tracing of the biblical lines of influence on a number of important American writers, especially Melville, whose Moby Dick also counts as the single most important work of American fiction by no less a religious and cultural critic than Cornel West. Bragg’s book is an extraordinary compendium of information, less about the creation of the KJV than about its long cultural aftermath. It thus supplements the story of the cr…

I Would Also Like a Splinter Scouting Organization, Please

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…find the case persuasive at all. Meanwhile, Girl Scouts USA is not in the business of dictating, in a theo-con or neo-con idiom, which things God hates and what things God approves of and why. That’s part of why it has the success and reach that it does. If the other were its mission, it would be a very different organization. So Girl Scouts USA isn’t going to stop what it does well simply because some people wish it were the organization that th…

Scientology: All-American or Aging Hoax?

By Gordon Haber

…trine, then with its particularly American nexus of religion, culture, and business. These themes are explored in a pair of new books, both of which examine the history of the church without sensationalism or facile mockery: Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology, which grew out of her 2005 Rolling Stone article, and The Church of Scientology by Hugh Urban, a professor at Ohio State University who studies religious secrecy. It’s not surprising that…

Occupy’s Sacred Mob and the Politics of Vagrancy

By Vincent Gonzalez

…to build homes on the commons—a politics of vagrancy: students feed small business owners, who donate supplies in turn; anarchists insulate tents with reform-minded voters; and, vitally, homeless people and the tentatively housed, already residents of our plaza, form bonds of affinity and mutual aid with “middle-class” protesters. But simultaneously, differences in tactics, language, and aesthetics regularly cause people to wander back to their m…

Occupy Francis Lewis Boulevard

By Haroon Moghul

…while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonly worn by people in the northwest of t…

Will Ron Paul Win Iowa, and is the Catholic Church Discriminated Against?

By Sarah Posner

Last Friday, Business Insider politics editor Michael Brendan Dougherty and I talked GOP presidential politics, crisis pregnancy centers, and claims by Republicans like Darrell Issa, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops itself, that Catholics are being discriminated against by Obama administration policy. We taped before Herman Cain’s announcement of the suspension of his campaign, but Michael and I had agreed we weren’t going to talk abou…