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The Muslim Ban May Be Unconstitutional, But It’s Not Un-American

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…ern trees like strange fruit, the effects of warehousing and killing Asian Americans in detention camps, the genocidal removal of Native Americans from the homes they built and the destruction of their relationship with the earth, a prison industrial system that profits the few at the expense of millions of Black and Brown bodies, and mass graves of Mexican migrants on the Southern borders. Something demonic has been at work in the historical arc…

Puritan Narcissus: The Myth of American Exceptionalism

By Nick Street

…r. Most of our politicians trade on the illusion that the globalization of American (and American-style) consumerism is synonymous with democratization and social stability. In fact, stabilizing the supply of energy to the transnational economic grid has meant our investing billions to support politically destabilizing alliances and undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Islam, like Christianity, contains seeds of violence and radi…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…the religiously unaffiliated, changes in religiosity, and the evolution of American secularity. Courtney Bender, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Bender extends the work of Albanese, offering an ethnographic exploration of self-identified metaphysical practitioners as their apparently eclectic, unique, and personal spiritualities resist, engage, resource, and i…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…he coerced labor and/or bottomless misery experienced routinely by African Americans and by the fear that African Americans might actually gain ground, as Carol Anderson brilliantly documents. This nexus becomes blindingly obvious at certain junctures (e.g. 1863’s explosion of anti-Black violence from Irish workers who saw both enslaved people and free people of color as their economic competitors). But the nexus is always there. Not for nothing w…

How a Stars and Stripes Hijab on ‘Rupaul’s Drag Race’ Reveals America’s Troubling Relationship to Gender, Ethnicity and ‘That’ Religion

By Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst

…e) often face anti-Muslim hostility, which is related—but not reducible—to American white supremacy.¹ American whiteness is fragile, contested, and—especially for folks associated with Islam—contingent on good behavior. On episode 7, Jackie Cox wept while outing herself as the child of an immigrant from a Muslim-majority country and claiming “this part of [her] heritage that [she] hid for so long.” We were prepared to leave our analysis of Ms. Cox…

Tattoos, Cremation, Personal Spirituality: The Jewish World in Transformation

By Dana Evan Kaplan

…the impact that the concept of personal spirituality has had on organized American Judaism. Americans today feel much freer to explore ceremonial and ritual practices that intrigue them regardless of what their community thinks of those particular ideas. This has allowed Jews to move in a number of different directions, including seemingly contradictory ones. I found some of these contradictory impulses fascinating. For example, there have been a…

The Marxist Roots of American Exceptionalism

By Michael J. Altman

…ferent from, rather than superior to, other countries, the long history of American beliefs in U.S. superiority could easily be retroactively attached to the concept. Part of the Marxist baggage that follows “American exceptionalism” is its teleology. Marxism posits a history of progress towards a goal. There will be a revolution and it will lead to equality. Similarly, today’s conservatives deploying American exceptionalism have a goal in mind—th…

The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…eaders will be able to see the emergence of the Bible Belt and the fate of American Calvinism in new and different ways. What alternative title would you give the book? I originally wanted to go with American Primitives full stop. No subtitle. I thought it was clean and it distilled the argument down to two words. Other folks found it cryptic and preposterous. I eventually agreed with them. Kinda. How do you feel about the cover? I love it. The de…

American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

By Amy Fallas

…to 1957 due to “disease.” In fact, advocacy organizations such as Survival International and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs formed during the 1960s in response to this drastic depopulation and widespread violence against native groups in the Amazon. These organizations, along with FUNAI (founded in 1967), continue to advocate against over-extraction of natural resources and contact with indigenous peoples that contributes to t…

Global LGBT Recap: Homogeopolitics; Dalai Lama Says Gay is OK; Pope Says Civil Unions May Be

By Peter Montgomery

…t Russians have positioned themselves as champions of “traditional values” internationally, in opposition to the pro-LGBT equality European Union. On the other hand, he said many LGBT activists had to be discreet in their involvement in Ukrainian protests, because of the involvement of right-wing anti-gay groups. In another story, Feder reports on a rise in anti-gay sentiment spreading from Uganda into neighboring Kenya, where homosexuality is tec…