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Kill Your Patriarchs: An Interview with Michael Muhammad Knight

By Hussein Rashid

…from it with “absolute sincerity”. The insights that MMK offers on Muslim American life are woven throughout his non-fiction and fictional works. Between Impossible Man and Osama Van Halen, for example, we get one insider’s view of the implosion of the Progressive Muslim Union, the first female-led prayer in the U.S., and a view of the problems with contemporary Muslim-American organizations. Blue-Eyed Devil, a must for any syllabus on Islam in A…

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…

Battlestar Galactica and the Future of American Religion

By Nick Street

…veys (see links at the end of this story) showing that about 15 percent of Americans identify their religious affiliation as “none of the above”—a cohort larger than Methodists, Episcopalians and Lutheran combined and double the number of “nones” since that last such survey in 1990. And among the 18- to 29-year-old demographic—the leading edge of a new generation of spiritually and technologically iconoclastic seekers and the core audience for med…

An End to the “Gentleman’s Agreement” on Israel?

By Jay Michaelson

…pped even more spectacularly than their many previous ones, Israel and its American friends have tended to focus on practicalities: money, boundaries, resources… and settlements. American maps may show the Golan as part of Syria, but every year, more Israeli-owned vineyards are planted. To suddenly focus on symbolism is good for fundraising letters, but bad for actual policy. In this case, at least, symbolism has prevailed. Because it is only a bu…

Scientology: All-American or Aging Hoax?

By Gordon Haber

…ory than a supposition that the church is, to some extent, a reflection of American values. He also posits a number of broad questions (maybe too broad) about how we define religion in America and about “legal and theoretical issues in the study of religion.” In the interest of objectivity, Urban employs a simultaneous “hermeneutics of respect and hermeneutics of suspicion”—meaning that he takes Scientology’s religious claims at face value while…

Religious Leaders Condemn National Prayer Breakfast; Offer Alternative American Prayer Hour

By Sarah Posner

…-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament. “Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. “We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God’s heart.” “I call upon our pr…

The Invention of a Corporate Christian America

By Andrew Aghapour

…ciation of Manufacturers to the cause and creating brand new ones like the American Liberty League. But Americans dismissed their naked paeans to capitalism as just business looking out for its own self-interest. (Democratic leader Jim Farley famously joked that they ought to call the American Liberty League “the American Cellophane League” because it was a DuPont product that you could see right through.) Realizing that the direct approach hadn’t…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…e fairy-tale story of irreversible progress in LGBT rights is a very white American story. Americans of color have long known that progress is not linear. LGBT people from countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, among others, can tell you what it feels like when attitudes make a U-turn. The laws in these countries are benign, compared to the many places in the world where homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment or even death, but tha…

The Most Ridiculous Responses to the Vatican’s Call-out of the Catho–Christian Right

By Patricia Miller

…ve come to characterize the U.S. church: Over the last decade, however, as American Christianity has weakened and American politics become ever-more-polarized, the Catholic position in the United States has become more difficult and perplexing. The Democratic Party, whose long-ago New Deal was built in part on Catholic social thought, has become increasingly secular and ever-more-doctrinaire in its social liberalism. The Republican Party, which un…

American Prosperity Gospel Makes South Sudan “Ripe for Exploitation”

By Anthea Butler

…ar, the believers at this Pentecostal church also consume the preaching of American Pentecostal media stars like T.D. Jakes and Benny Hinn. Anytime someone says, as a woman interviewed for the program did, that Benny Hinn is the man because he’s on TV, well, that’s an issue. Add in the prosperity gospel, and you have a potent mix that will surely change the scope of how Christianity will become appropriated in tandem with the political in South Su…