Religion Dispatches
…portant. When he goes to Uganda, he’s not known as Scott Lively, but as an American evangelical. When Warren goes to Kenya, he’s not Warren, but an American evangelical. As long as they have a church title and stand for conservative politics, they have influence. The Africans don’t always have the resources to follow their statements so they say: this man of God says this is going on in the world. Or Scott Lively goes to the Uganda Anti-gay Confer…
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…ugh for us to talk honestly about socially regressive attitudes within the American Muslim community? The reality is that homophobia in the American Muslim community very likely played a causal role in producing Omar Mateen’s hate crime. It certainly wasn’t the only source of homophobic bigotry influencing him, but it was one such source, and that is reason enough for American Muslims to resist the anti-gay sentiment in their mosques and community…
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…posite. They claim that “historical and critical theory have much to offer American Jewish sociology and American Jewish Studies.” The question is: what tools will be deployed to best navigate that engagement, making explicit what’s at stake and bringing a critical eye to the normative claims embedded in our habits and language? *** One of the questions that has consistently plagued Jewish Studies in the academy is where it belongs. Two possibilit…
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…ny in the deep resonances between Hochman’s and Weyrich’s statements about American conservatism. In a recent guest essay at the New York Times, Hochman argues that contemporary American conservatism has left the Christian Right—which was inspired by Goldwater and built by Weyrich, along with Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and many others—behind in favor of a more secular, expansive, and dynamic movement that’s protecting a “beleaguered American way o…
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…rily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Beck rants in Twitter-like aphorisms condensing David Barton’s execrable version o…
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…cultures while they are also expected to understand and respect the common American culture; 4. We acknowledge the nobility of the American experiment even as we acknowledge certain “flaws” that God needs to “mend” (in the prayer-hymn wording of Katherine Lee Bates). Now suppose we update this problematic creed for the sake of telling the truth, junking the impossible notion that God has somehow chosen the United States for a special destiny or is…
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…or the LGBT community in Jamaica: some claim that homosexuality is a North American import, and thus not part of Jamaican tradition and culture. However, American evangelical churches play a strong role in importing and exacerbating homophobia in Jamaica. Lewis explained that since the 1970s, American evangelical churches have become entrenched in Jamaican society and are no longer viewed as outsiders. In contrast, advocacy on behalf of the human…
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…potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins. It would make a great, cheesy musical number. Mormons are ideal subjects for musical parody because they have their own homegrown traditions of musical theater. Not counting its uniformed missionaries, the most recognizable Mormon “product” in the religious marketplace is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (“MoTab”), which sp…
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…the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that selfconsciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective. De-center American history? Heaven forfend! Subordinate our glorious saga to a “global and social-scientific perspective”? Never! National Review’s Stan…
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…communities—save for the Reconstructionists—identified Jewishness through one’s mother and not the father. I will focus on the substantial political and religious literature during this decade that stresses the “fracturing” and “polarization” of American life. The patrilineal decision decentered American Judaism, causing rifts within the various movements and shifting the center of concern from the United States to Israel. So far, I have delivere…
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