Religion Dispatches
…protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist. In my particular area of the study, the 1920s Klan, the Knights, recruited members with both warnings of a nation in decline as well as a vision of a fabled white Protestant America, which could be recaptured, recreated, or even relived through their efforts. This nation needed defenders to protect citizens and to uplift the historical legacy…
Read More…have a tendency to racialize themselves: We’re brown and black, Asian and African, but rarely white—and European only with difficulty. Many Muslims view the Middle East, sometimes defined generously to include Berbers, Turks, or South Asians, as a kind of Islamic heartland, where the “real Islam” exists; those from outside the region are assumed to be more recently converted, and thus less authentically Muslim. This frame’s even used by those who…
Read More…ey brought in $18 million last quarter, far outpacing any of his announced Republican rivals, but coming nowhere close to the Obama campaign’s $60 million first-quarter haul. The numbers have been met with a fresh round of handwringing about GOP heavyweights still sitting on the sidelines as well as Romney’s weaknesses against Obama in 2012. But there may be, just may be, signs that Romney is gaining in one strategic capacity that could prove cruc…
Read More…The event, “Feet on the Ground,” focused on Mycoskie’s efforts to provide free shoes for children in Africa. Focus was seeking to become a distributor of TOMS shoes in Africa, until Mycoskie was called out by the magazine Jezebel for his participation in the event. There’s nothing inherently political about distributing shoes to African children, of course. In theory, it’s a good thing for Focus to spend less time trying to police sex and more ac…
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…Court ruled unanimously that the city ban violated the church’s religious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents laws that place an undue burden on people’s ability to express their religion. The religious methods of slaughter such as the Jewish shechita and the Islamic dhabh remain in most countries, though that is slowly changing. The Dutch parliament recently passed a bill requ…
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…ievers bracing for a circus sideshow. Traveling across America to speak on freethought and abolitionism during the 19th century, white feminist atheist Ernestine Rose was smeared as being a “thousand times below a prostitute.” Centuries after Rose, the association of faith with female virtue and morality is still pervasive in our post-feminist post-racial Christian nation. Indeed, for some women of color, being “married to Jesus” is the only lifel…
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…the emergence of something like the new Faith Advocates for Jobs network. Freedom from the Experience of Humiliation? It’s a Bit More Complicated There is a growing current in religious thought that emphasizes the potential for liberation in finding that life goes on when a job comes to an end—or when any other significant personal catastrophe occurs. Richard Rohr’s well-received Falling Upward falls broadly into this category. Rohr writes that i…
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…st silent film The Birth of a Nation (which lionized the KKK and portrayed African Americans as unequivocally licentious) debuted at the White House just a few years later reminds us of an ever-looming undercurrent in American history. While there is clearly much more to Dante’s epic poem than anti-Muslim angst, the embedded nature of such xenophobia into European and American national culture deserves recognition. Today, much of what manifests it…
Read More…t-turned-Anglican and an early advocate for abolition who ran a school for Africans in New York City. Roman Catholics arrived in greater numbers in the nineteenth century, from places like Ireland, Germany, and Italy. As with other groups, finding their place in the rich tapestry of American diversity did not always come easy. John Hughes, who became the first archbishop of New York (and the founder of what is now Fordham University), protested th…
Read More…ir 70s: gay men, mostly, but lesbians too; white, Asian-American, Latino, African-American, and Native Hawaiian. Many served LDS proselytizing missions, raised children, and held positions of responsibility in their local congregations before coming out of the closet. Some have stopped participating in LDS institutional life, while others have continued by walking a carefully negotiated path. Many gay Mormons in attendance had partnered with oth…
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