Religion Dispatches
…rofessor Rashid should not attack the Community for assuming the mantle of American Muslim leadership when other American Muslims have remained timid or silent on these issues. Second, Professor Rashid contends that the American Muslim community is represented by a diverse range of organizations, and it is this very diversity that makes it difficult for any one Muslim organization to speak with any authority. Professor Rashid is correct to point o…
Read More….” Like Kennedy and Bush before him, Obama introduced the classic creed of American civil religion, the connection between God and American “liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.” But he did so with an interesting and important shift. Obama abstained from the language of divinely-endowed “rights,” and spoke instead of the “God-given promise,” which is a “precious gift” and “noble idea.” Rights are, of course, endowed, inherent in the cr…
Read More
…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…
Read More
…John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, as I waited to board a flight back home to Oslo. I was there on Aug. 14, 2016, when, after years of the “War on Terror,” one of North America’s most important international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the…
Read More…one has to be Muslim for at least six months to make hajj. So I go to the American embassy and secure an affidavit stating I have been practicing Islam since 1972. When I brought that to the embassy they said: you need to have a mahram, the male guardian. At the time I was divorced and my son, Muhammad was only six years old, living with his dad while I was away. My father was deceased and all the other living males in my family were not Muslim….
Read More
…er of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the huge, ornately carved bass doors Francis pushed open at St. Peter’s when he de…
Read More
…16 US cities, drawing sold-out crowds at every stop, with regularly priced tickets ranging between $250 and $500. It is arguably the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the st…
Read More
…nd insights probably tell us more about the power and place of religion in American society than any of these others. Second, American historians have written extensively about Du Bois but have basically ignored his interest in religion. I felt shocked to read book after book about The Souls of Black Folk that focused on the word “folk” in the title but not on “souls.” This struck me as a blind spot in the profession. And lastly, in 2002 I was a f…
Read More
…the Women’s March, organizers are suddenly claiming it’s not about the numbers after all. March for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predicta…
Read More
…rican,” one that pitted the American creed of freedom and equality against American reality. An American Dilemma was an anti-racist opus; it was cited in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision; one of Myrdal’s collaborators on the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s…
Read More