Religion Dispatches
…en in reality it is deeply rooted in the history of African peoples in the New World; that non-Christian religious affiliations, especially Judaism and Buddhism, render black Americans racially and culturally inauthentic. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? Every author wants to be read. My wish is for the broadest audience possible. One is often surprised by the audience that one receives or does not. I hope that there are a lo…
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…. Louis skyline from where our group stood on the mounds, was a “symbol of American terrorism” to the black communities that its construction displaced. Through eminent domain, 37 blocks of homes and businesses in the thriving black St. Louis community were razed to make room for a monument to the United States’ western expansion. To add insult to injury, discriminatory hiring policies made many of the promised construction jobs unavailable to non…
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…is about one animal metamorphosing into another animal. Lin titles it “The Flight of the Peng Bird.” This is his version: In the Northern Sea, there is a giant fish. Its name is Kun. Its size is incredibly large. No one knows how many thousands of miles its length measures. The Kun fish is able to transform into a bird, known as Peng. The Peng bird is also incredibly large. No one knows how many thousands of miles its wingspan measures. Peng chang…
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…in most places; they were usable in Ferguson. So large numbers of African Americans who were displaced by urban renewal, by slum clearance in the central city, moved outside the central city, north and west, into places like Ferguson. Since African Americans were prohibited from living in most other places, those communities became predominantly or nearly all black. So that’s how Ferguson became the Ferguson we know today. Why is this history so…
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…of the virtual world. Joseph Adama questions the point of the creation of New Cap City, if it is no different than the real world—ask i.e. it follows all the physical rules of the real world and if you die, you are excluded from the game permanently. So why create New Cap City? The answer that he is provided has to do mostly with moral consequences: that he can kill anyone in here without going to jail and that he can frak 50 women in a night. Bu…
Read More…was made out to be and explains his theodicy as a response to his family’s flight from the Armenian genocide in Turkey. His whole life project was to try to figure out what could protect you. In the end, he came down to the only thing that is solid is God’s law. Well, you say the word law in the 20th or 21st century, and people break out in a rash. I’m not sure why she used the word theodicy — which is an attempt to answer the theological problem…
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…at was supposed to be the original site of the Academy Awards. Post white-flight in the sixties and seventies Inglewood became a predominantly African American community. It now “boasts” an eclectic array of faith institutions from Church of Scientology storefronts to mosques. I think the cover evokes many of the book’s themes about whiteness, innocence and redemption; bringing it full circle to the last chapter which explores the racial politics…
Read More…ile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all.” Today, Cuba is more in our reach. As a Cuban-American from Miami I have been raised amidst the existential crisis of the Cuban exile community, a community with a rabid anger towards the Castro regime and simultaneous love and compassion for their fellow Cubans on the island. I, like many children of exiles, was raised holding…
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…ing Obama’s election for the fulfillment of King’s social vision. As Isaac Newton Ferris, King’s nephew and the CEO of the King Center put it, “The dream was not about an individual or a race obtaining power.” Ferris may have been right, but this was a crowd ready to celebrate the beginning of the Obama age. Speaker after speaker explained how, as one of them said, “the dream of Martin Luther King gave birth to the hope of Barack Obama.” Jimmy Car…
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…alese sojourn, I heard the distinctly flat-accented voices of men from the American Midwest waft up from the street through an open window in my second-floor hotel room. One of the voices belonged to Heuertz, but the others I didn’t recognize. A few moments later, I encountered three big middle-aged guys from Wisconsin with rucksacks strapped to their backs, dressed like a cross between trekkers and construction workers, which is, essentially, wha…
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