Religion Dispatches
…Improvement Association of the early twentieth century not only pushed for African Americans to move to Africa, but also sold images of Jesus as black. During the Harlem Renaissance, when black poets like Countee Cullen wished that “He I served were black,” artists M. Gray Johnson and Fred Bucholz depicted lynched southern black men as neo-Christ figures. These images, in tandem with poems by Langston Hughes and short stories by W. E. B. Du Bois,…
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…and combining of distinct belief systems, has always been embraced by many African Americans, she adds. “More are exploring Buddhism, Sufism, and African Traditional Religions in adaptive waves.” Russel Jeung, a professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University, describes the hybridized practices adopted by some Asian Americans. He sees how Vietnamese Americans create home shrines that blend the traditional—a single photo of an…
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…? Why? In addition to Mitch Duneier’s Sidewalk, I would say Eli Anderson’s Code of the Street. It’s such a wonderful example of using the ethnographic method to dig beneath common stereotypes and reveal the social dynamics underlying a supposedly well-understood phenomenon. In his case, he’s looking at the situation of inner-city violence among young African American men. By carefully observing, listening, documenting, and then analyzing, he is ab…
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…eprechaun that I saw in a pub window. Recent surveys show Catholics in the Republic of Ireland are deserting their faith faster than believers in almost any other nation worldwide. According to Irish and Vatican analysts, the current crisis was precipitated by revelations of widespread clergy sexual abuse but also fueled by the post-1960s spread of secular values, upending forty-plus years of a postcolonial, faith-based society. (After the establi…
Read More…urports “reconnect Americans to the history of the American Republic.” The republic, the IOTC maintains, is comprised of “Sovereign States with a central government of purposely limited powers based on Biblical principles.” Titus spoke to an audience of about 200 people at the Heritage Community Church in Severn, Maryland. During the question and answer session of Titus’ lecture on what he claims is the true meaning of the First Amendment, several…
Read More…earning to be comfortable living in debt. From its inception, the American republic has been profoundly influenced by both Christianity and capitalism, both of which speak to the question of debt, if from opposite angles. How do you assess the legacy of the partnership? I was recently reading Kate Bowler’s Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, and she does a nice job of tracing how the Protestant ethic and this sort of rugged, libe…
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…e movement—we are the conservative movement,” they attacked “establishment Republicans.” Mike Lee criticized “the top Democrat and Republican in each chamber” for having gotten too powerful and echoed the narrative Suella Braverman presented on the previous day: that the Tories lost their recent election because they “met progressives half-way”—an observation completely untethered from reality. “We’ve gotta stop assuming that you win elections and…
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…actical error, rather than make the citizenship and democracy question the central issue of the book, Sand undermines his argument by making claims about Jewish history that are difficult to substantiate. As one astute commenter on the Haaretz Web site put it, Sand’s book is more about the past than the future. Interviewed by that newspaper’s correspondent, Sand responded strongly to both academic and popular criticism of his thesis. But it is the…
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…o hung signs outside the church: “This is a Sanctuary for the Oppressed of Central America,” and “Immigration: do not profane the Sanctuary of God.” The church gave shelter to thousands fleeing the Central American death squads. In 1986, Fife was one of eight activists convicted on alien-smuggling charges and served five years’ probation. His fellow defendant, Sister Darlene Nicgorski, argued for her First Amendment right to practice her religion,…
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…analogy of Cold War ignorance of the Soviet Union to American ignorance of Central Asian Islam is striking. Relative to the timeline of the Cold War, I would say American knowledge of Central Asian religion puts us, by comparison, at about 1971. Most Americans learn a thing or two about Islam in school in a class called ‘Religion.’ We know it is out there because we read a chapter about it in a book. Maybe we even took a test. But then we just wen…
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