Religion Dispatches
…l M. Nelson has the same cadence as Thomas S. Monson, so the transition to new lyrics should be about as seamless as the transition to a new straight white American male LDS president….
Read More…ng question for the Bellah thesis about the US Civil Religion is whether a new century and this new war, provide the US civil religion with a new opportunity for growth, adaptation and change. And while the prophetic mode has been rather muted under the leadership of the Bush team, it will be fascinating to see how a new administration under the aegis of a very different kind of leader, will deploy the quasi-religious rhetoric of the American civi…
Read More…hat suggests a far higher per-capita rate of offending clergy than even in New Mexico. In New Mexico, the victims of abuse were mainly Nuevomexicano and Indigenous kids. The abusers were often, but not always, white. Many came to New Mexico from faraway places, but some were local men. Colonialism is a structure that has touched everybody and everything here. It has formed New Mexican Catholicism since the arrival of Spaniards in the 16th century,…
Read More
…s duplicity. The letters (signs) can be read two ways: they represent both American Beauty and American Reality. In western thought, beauty and reality are of a piece since the good, the true, and the beautiful inform and form each other. But beauty can deceive, money talks, and power attracts. The Dead understand and critique this duplicity. In order to understand it they conjure American figures who exemplify this contradiction, a sort of courag…
Read More
…ges to write not only a history of Jesus in American culture, but really a new kind of history of American religion that is challenging enough for scholars but also accessible to undergraduates and the general public. It’s an amazing work. Frankly, anything Prothero has ever written would be my pick. What’s your next book? I plan to continue my collaboration with dark powers. In fact, I am, hopefully, not yet done with Satan. I am in very early ta…
Read More
…staged a protest. Thus a news story that did not get wide coverage in the American print media (the New York Times chose not to cover the story) made headlines in India—in today’s media world, it seems, there are no more “backpage stories.” Exactly a month after his resignation from the institute, Arun Gandhi and his son Tushar Gandhi attempted to organize a protest in Bombay. Unlike the Calcutta Telegraph, Bombay newspapers reported the story bu…
Read More
…ted and disseminated by powerful media representatives on Fox News and One American News Network (OANN), along with a not insignificant number of elected members of Congress. A great deal of the concern on the part of white people is over their potential loss of status in America. This concern is being expressed in current Trumpist Republican efforts to curb access to voting by people of color and the social panic being fomented about “Critical Ra…
Read More
…efforts, in Louisiana and elsewhere, to radically change the landscape of American education and to ultimately transform society into the anti-democratic image of the New Apostolic Reformation. And America’s education system is just one of the core institutions under attack by the NAR, a global neo-charismatic and Pentecostal movement of leadership networks that are, according to Frederick Clarkson and André Gagne, on the “cutting edge of the Chr…
Read More
…touch-ups, cosmetic varnishings of otherwise natural bodies. For instance, American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson’s full figure was digitally winnowed for the cover of Self magazine. And last year a New York Times article called attention to a Ralph Lauren ad that sparked controversy for featuring a “model with hips narrower than her head.” The bodies now appearing before our eyes are anatomically impossible. Such standards of beauty brought forth in…
Read More
…lition against this abominable measure should be welcomed. But as a timely new report from the think tank Political Research Associates makes clear, the American religious right can’t evade responsibility for the homophobic mania that’s seized several African countries. Anti-gay activists in the United States may think the Uganda measure goes too far, but they laid the groundwork for it. PRA’s report, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservati…
Read More