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Year-End Best Books in Race and Religion in American History

By Paul Harvey

…g here particularly on books focusing on people of African descent. African-American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom Sylvester A. Johnson Cambridge University Press October 2015 The first one is not for the faint of heart, and not for anyone who wants the comforting story of “from slavery to freedom” reaffirmed. Sylvester Johnson’s African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom. But mostly, as…

Yes, It’s Worse To Be Gay in Russia

By Chrissy Stroop

…, although we might see a glimmer of hope in the fact that respondents aged 18-24 were much less supportive of the law, along with residents of Moscow. (Specific percentages for these demographics were not in the publicly available Levada Center write-up, so we’ll have to make do with these generalities.) I’m not sure what might motivate American “liberals” to dismiss what’s happening in Russia. For my own part, I’m more likely to encounter this…

Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

By Jay Michaelson

…more ambivalent about him) and therefore he can’t be seen getting in knock-down, drag-out fights with his sons. Good people don’t do that. And of course, Jesus can’t be tempted by sins of the flesh—even though the Bible itself suggests that he might’ve been. I don’t think it’s because Aronofsky’s Noah has a mixture of admirable and flawed elements that he raises fundamentalist suspicions. It’s because he has a mixture of any kind at all. Progress…

Religion Profs Critique PBS’ God Documentary, Call it Simplistic

By Matthew Avery Sutton

Well, it’s over. Last week the six-hour, multi-million-dollar Frontline/American Experience production God in America aired on PBS. Now the debate over its merits begins. Reviews from journalists have been mostly positive, although New York Times television critic Mike Hale was not totally impressed. The show, he wrote, was “stuffed with facts and dates and figures” and sometimes strained “to find a way to tie them together.” He also called it “a…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…on it. Here’s Sean Hannity back in January on his radio show: Why should Americans be paying the $9 a month for birth control pills that you can get at Wal-Mart? Why should—especially Catholics and people of faith, and Christians and people of other faiths that this is against their religious teachings … why should other people be buying others’ birth control? Why are people accused of waging a war on women if they don’t want to pay for their bi…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…t on it. Here’s Sean Hannity back in January on his radio show: Why should Americans be paying the $9 a month for birth control pills that you can get at Wal-Mart? Why should—especially Catholics and people of faith, and Christians and people of other faiths that this is against their religious teachings … why should other people be buying others’ birth control? Why are people accused of waging a war on women if they don’t want to pay for their bi…

Among the Problems with Trump’s Proposed Ban: Who is a Muslim?

By Michael Schulson

…y Muslim communities in the United States, where there are substantial Arab-American, South Asian-American, African-American, and Latino Muslim populations. Still, the subtext of a lot of political rhetoric about Islam is that there’s some characteristic Muslimness that inheres in the body, regardless of heritage. “The whole question is, who exactly are Muslims?” asks Zareena Grewal, a professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale an…

The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback

By Gary Dorrien

…a stake in both subjects, and a track record of worrying that make-up-your-own-religion yields shallow and self-absorbed spiritualities. But the new books rightly emphasize that liberal Protestantism played a sizable role in creating the spiritual-but-not-religious sensibility that pervades the North American middle class, and they do so with a mostly appreciative attitude. From Shrinking Churches to ‘Cultural Victory’ Intellectual historian Davi…

Is Religious Freedom a Casualty at Ground Zero?

By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

…ll as more engaged in local civic and political activities. The Council of American-Islamic Relations (established in 1994) is but one example of such institutions. It was founded with the aim of fighting for causes of concern to Muslims abroad (such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict), but, as the needs and concerns of American Muslims changed, it evolved into an advocacy organization for American Muslim civil rights. The local and national Musl…

Vivek Ramaswamy Represents the Convergence of White Supremacy and Hindu Supremacy — And He May Well Be Trump’s Running Mate

By Usha Kumar

…within the far-right has converged with the growing maturity of the Indian-American community, allowing Ramaswamy to ride the wave of an unprecedented alignment between Hindu supremacist and White supremacist politics. After all, while Indian-Americans have often been lured by proximity to Whiteness and anti-Blackness as the final assimilative panacea to migration,¹ this had never yet manifested itself in the form of an organized commitment to Am…