Religion Dispatches
…ican and Indigenous Americans have suffered much worse. Up into the 1930s, Republicans attacked the Democrats as “the party of rum, Romanism, and rebellion,” and a Democratic president’s heritage was questioned with sneers at “Franklin Rosenfeld.” Haven’t the American people learned? King is perpetuating an American tradition, but one that should have been sent the way of Jim Crow segregation, not to preserve as part of our “American way of life.”…
Read More…OP prospects are trying to outdo each other, leading Herman Cain, the only African-American in the bunch, to come out with some of the most overtly bigoted statements against Muslims. (Perhaps the white candidates don’t have to try quite as strenuously.) But they’re all tapping into something that was already there: an evangelical base that buys John Hagee’s theodicy but not Jeremiah Wright’s, that looks to the Bible for guidance on foreign policy…
Read More…said of him: “I believe Shuttlesworth personified a significant essence of African American spirituality and the black way of being Christian.” Most of the remembrances about Shuttlesworth highlight his relationship to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., his work in Birmingham, and the non-invitation to King’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1964. But Shuttlesworth should also be remembered for being the one, in a time of non-violent protest, to give up hi…
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…end of the world. When I was writing my chapter on Billy Graham’s visit to Central Park in September 1991 for Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, a group of Korean evangelicals were excitedly proclaiming the end of the world on October 28, 1992. On Good Friday 1878, Charles Taze Russell of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, gathered a group of his followers on the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh to await their translation into heaven. Russell later denied bein…
Read More…esentations of an offended religious minority were ignored for the sake of freedom of speech, only to have international consequences. Although the Rushdie affair erupted in 1989 with the publication of The Satanic Verses, toward the end of Thatcher’s period in power, the author of that book has recently appreciated the support he received from Thatcher when offering his own reflections on her life. One wonders whether a more diplomatic British le…
Read More…director of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Program to Promote and Protect America’s Freedom. In that role, he made combatting “jihadis” a focal point of his activities. But Santorum never let go of his old culture war issues — in fact they became a central facet of his ideology against Islam. I had the chance to interview Santorum in late 2007, as the Republican presidential primary was in full swing, and the candidates were t…
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…of Shari’ah which are never fully conclusive, because Islam recognizes no central authority to define those readings once and for all. Thus Islam’s decentralization, its many competing discourses, all pushing and pulling around a body of texts that are nearly universally agreed upon—but over whose interpretations most debates never end. What most Americans don’t realize is that we already have interpretations of Shari’ah law in our country; or, a…
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…re in this universe was Mount Meru? On the surface of a sphere there is no central or special point for it to rest. Of course, the modern scientific idea finally took hold, but, due to the remoteness of Tibet, it was not until the 20th century that it made its way fully to that land. The Dalai Lama has been in power since 1960, so cosmology has been a live issue for him. How does he handle the mount Mount Meru question? Very simply. On Monday he l…
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…unctioning autonomously from male authority, even in the process of finding a mate. Girls are to rely on their fathers to do this for them and remain in submission to their fathers until they have been given over to submit to their husbands. These organizations all promote literature, lectures, conferences, and other materials intended to promote this perspective, as well as the starkly delineated gender norms and expectations upon which this view…
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…mes I will cover that day. When we write articles, we usually focus on one central argument. Our best books, in turn, most often contain only a few more major themes. No doubt creating a television documentary about any historical topic requires a reduction in complexity and nuance. But so does delivering a good lecture and writing a good monograph. Yet scholars tend to hold filmmakers to different standards than they hold their academic peers, an…
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