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Shucking Off The ’50s. And the ’40s. And the…

By Daniel Schultz

…data like he does. More broadly, I think all of this talk about “creative class states” and “working class states” and this complex and that special interest misses the point. One of the major theses of my book Changing the Script is that we are stuck because there is a distinct lack of imagination on the part of our political leaders. They are unable or unwilling to question the basic premises that exert such control in our lives—consumerism, mi…

Hajj Journal: Part of the Process

By Amina Wadud

…isty skit (a hijabi confessing she likes to curse “a lot”), but no working-class, no poor people, no African Americans, and in the end, everything would be molded to “fit” a white middle class A-plus student stereotype. So next time the audience is half my age, I’ll think twice about giving them my last free evening. It’s good we are standing up for ourselves. I guess poor and working-class young Muslim women will eventually make their stand or th…

It’s Not “Inappropriate” for Public School Teacher to Tell Class that Obama Isn’t Christian

By Joseph Laycock

…whatever religious views she wants, but when she shares those views to her classroom in her capacity as a public school teacher her speech becomes government speech. Her views about what makes a “real” Christian are a confessional position and when she used her position as a government employee to impose those views on others, it undermined the establishment clause. That’s the real issue. The fact that she also offended students and parents is imp…

Ross Douthat: Trump Is Women’s Fault for Not Having More Babies

By Patricia Miller

…nservatism that has stoked anger and despair among the left-behind working class. As the Dalai Lama and Arthur Brooks wrote recently, the answer to the despair sweeping through increasingly superfluous working-class communities is both spiritual and temporal. What’s needed, they say, is a concerted effort to “create a wealth of opportunities for meaningful work, so that everyone who is capable of contributing can do so.” Telling people “you should…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…

Can Faith-Based Organizing for Gun Control Work?

By Sarah Posner

…ail the number of gun deaths in America, the number of mass shootings, the number of accidents, the number of suicides. The movement would have more than these grassroots activists. It would have willing politicians, a legal strategy, and lots of money. All of these components would work in tandem to change people’s minds, to pressure lawmakers, to intimidate politicians running for office, to go to court when necessary. With these political, legi…

Noise in the Hood: Raising the Volume and Losing Our Bodies

By Peter Laarman

…exquisitely sensitive to the ways in which the history of noise expresses class relations and class consciousness. He shows his contempt for smug middle- and upper-middle class types demanding silence as their natural right providing a hilarious account of Thomas Carlyle’s frustrated efforts to build himself a soundproof study in a raucous 1850s London. Keizer also has little patience with academic elites who wish to celebrate noisy outbursts of…

The Jihadi Revolution is Dead (But Bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Kill It)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…le of sacred warfare has been an exciting and alluring image among a large number of mostly young and largely male Muslims around the world for over a decade. It is an image that was brought to dramatic attention by the September 11, 2001 attacks, and stimulated by the perception that US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against Islam. This jihadi vision of sacred warfare was propagated by the internet, through postings on chat ro…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…