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Hajj Journal: Door Number 89: The Door with No Name

By Amina Wadud

…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…

New Reports Reveal Global Persecution of Nonbelievers

By Austin Dacey

…on bail he was subsequently locked up due to a clerical error before being released on December 17. Saber’s is not an isolated case. Around the globe, persecution and discrimination against secularists, atheists, and religious skeptics is widespread and apparently rising according to two new studies, one from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, and the other from a coalition of secularist, atheist, and humanist organizatio…

I Agree: Critical Race Theory is Indeed Incompatible With Southern Baptist Convention’s ‘Faith and Message’

By Miguel A. De La Torre

…e six white men who lead the seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention released a joint statement on November 30th denouncing Critical Race Theory. Specifically, they “declare[d] that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message.” I totally agree with them! The uncritical self-examination of the Southern Baptist Convention’s racism and the Baptist…

There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

By Paul Harvey

…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…

Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…

A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

By Elizabeth Drescher

…der dresses and ridiculously high-heeled shoes. They sipped from splits of cheap sparkling wine while their tuxedoed companions swilled the local brew, Budweiser—that, too, a faded American icon, sold off in 2008 to the Belgium-based multinational, InBev. No, of course, these were not the protesters who have begun to appear in more and more American cities, but keepers of the once-stable base of a certain version of the fabled American Dream: wedd…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…ollars in relief aid. It’s OK to give corporations access to unlimited and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. But it’s not OK to give normal people an extra $600 a week, people who are at the same time being coaxed by billionaires into going back to work even at the risk of death. It goes almost without saying that there’s more than a little connection between conservative economic ideology and conservative racial ideology. Part of the performa…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…e Americans with disabilities being hauled off by Capitol cops, and to the numberless people standing against legal authority that suspects them for the crime of simply being black or Muslim or queer? If we think about Catonsville not just as a curiosity, a minor episode in the history of radical chic, but as a provocation or a template, what do we learn? Must Americans burn something to get attention? Must religious protesters be arrested? Many c…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…e in effect subsidized the expansion of the American economy through their cheap labor, the provisions in the bill allowing for a path to legalization were hard to defend. Into this vacuum come restrictionist voices that frame the issue in purely individualistic, ahistoric terms: hordes of immigrants are coming in, willfully breaking our laws, selfishly taking advantage of this country’s freedoms and resources. Here the word “illegal” becomes a ra…