Search for "American Airlines 1800-299-7264 Rebooking Reservation Number"

Tattoos, Cremation, Personal Spirituality: The Jewish World in Transformation

By Dana Evan Kaplan

…the impact that the concept of personal spirituality has had on organized American Judaism. Americans today feel much freer to explore ceremonial and ritual practices that intrigue them regardless of what their community thinks of those particular ideas. This has allowed Jews to move in a number of different directions, including seemingly contradictory ones. I found some of these contradictory impulses fascinating. For example, there have been a…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…etocentric worldview of monks. By restricting the monastic population to a number just large enough to run monasteries and to provide “costumed natives” for the tourist industry, Chinese government policymakers are privileging values like political stability, the physical preservation of monastic institutions as historical/cultural “relics,” and the tangible economic gains derived from treating these institutions as tourist venues. When they objec…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…

It Is Time For American Orthodox Christians to Protest Russia’s Persecution of LGBT

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ns have become too progressive. Of course, these are the most innocuous of American converts. American Orthodoxy has also managed to become the go-to religion of the alt-right, courtesy of being sufficiently medieval without being Roman Catholic. The combination of these historical realities has created an environment in which—even though there exists a progressive plurality among self-identified American Orthodox Christians—public statements that…

“I Think the White Evangelical Church is Dead”: Dr. Russell Jeung on ‘Guilt’ vs. ‘Shame’ and Decolonizing Asian-American Christianity

By Deborah Jian Lee

…practice. My research has looked at what a lot of second-generation Asian Americans are doing. For example, Vietnamese-Americans who are Catholics are also developing home shrines, a practice of honoring ancestors. Their approach revealed how they were doing it in a hybridized way—embracing both the traditional and the personally meaningful. On their shrine they’d place something traditional, like just a photo and maybe fruits, but they would als…

The Muslim Ban May Be Unconstitutional, But It’s Not Un-American

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…ern trees like strange fruit, the effects of warehousing and killing Asian Americans in detention camps, the genocidal removal of Native Americans from the homes they built and the destruction of their relationship with the earth, a prison industrial system that profits the few at the expense of millions of Black and Brown bodies, and mass graves of Mexican migrants on the Southern borders. Something demonic has been at work in the historical arc…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…he coerced labor and/or bottomless misery experienced routinely by African Americans and by the fear that African Americans might actually gain ground, as Carol Anderson brilliantly documents. This nexus becomes blindingly obvious at certain junctures (e.g. 1863’s explosion of anti-Black violence from Irish workers who saw both enslaved people and free people of color as their economic competitors). But the nexus is always there. Not for nothing w…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the religiously unaffiliated, changes in religiosity, and the evolution of American secularity. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Bender extends the work of Albanese, offering an ethnographic exploration of self-identified metaphysical practitioners as their apparently eclectic, unique, and personal spiritualities resist, engage, resource, and i…

The Marxist Roots of American Exceptionalism

By Michael J. Altman

…ferent from, rather than superior to, other countries, the long history of American beliefs in U.S. superiority could easily be retroactively attached to the concept. Part of the Marxist baggage that follows “American exceptionalism” is its teleology. Marxism posits a history of progress towards a goal. There will be a revolution and it will lead to equality. Similarly, today’s conservatives deploying American exceptionalism have a goal in mind—th…

How a Stars and Stripes Hijab on ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ Reveals America’s Troubling Relationship to Gender, Ethnicity and ‘That’ Religion

By Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

…e) often face anti-Muslim hostility, which is related—but not reducible—to American white supremacy.¹ American whiteness is fragile, contested, and—especially for folks associated with Islam—contingent on good behavior. On episode 7, Jackie Cox wept while outing herself as the child of an immigrant from a Muslim-majority country and claiming “this part of [her] heritage that [she] hid for so long.” We were prepared to leave our analysis of Ms. Cox…