Religion Dispatches
…hgoing and religious belief are the highest in the nation — making African American communities the most unwaveringly religious in the U.S. At the same time, African American communities are among the most economically and racially disenfranchised; in the U.S., African Americans are still disproportionately poor, under-educated and over-incarcerated. Black incarceration rates and black homelessness parallel each other. And for all of the sound and…
Read More
…d part of the the world are aware of this selective reporting from Israel; Americans less so. This widespread American ignorance of the variety of political opinion within Israel is the result of a sustained decades-long campaign on the part of organizations represented in the Conference, a campaign which reflects the acute unease that dissident Israeli opinion generates in the United States. One of the prime ‘offenders’ in the eyes of the self-ap…
Read More
…y of them evangelical Christians who identify as white—to the old story of American exceptionalism and American Innocence. To be clear, I think that this war can be won, but it can only be won if we don’t make the mistake of misjudging the enemy. It can be won if Black people continue to be the field commanders, as their righteous witness can’t be dismissed and ridiculed by the Raging Right without exposing the racist core of the Right’s project….
Read More…nda has been intensified over the last year and a half, says Kaggwa, since American religious right activist Scott Lively dropped, in his words, a “nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.” Lively, the former head of the California affiliate of the American Family Association, and an ally of the AFA’s virulently anti-gay policy director Bryan Fischer, led a three-day conference that Kaggwa says sparked a “panic” in evangelical and Pentecosta…
Read More
…ch as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Digital Atlas of American Religion—to the narrow—the Hindu American Foundation’s map of Hindus worldwide (with accompanying demographic information comparing “Hindus/Asian/Indian” favorably on various socioeconomic rankings to other racial and nationality categories). Unlike other kinds of maps, maps of American religion must negotiate the difficulty of that term—what counts, what doesn’t,…
Read More
…ill surely happen again, if we do not stop enabling it—our conversation as Americans will remain corrupted, and surely our conversation as American Christians who claim to speak for peace and justice will be but sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. In lines written seven decades ago, Langston Hughes laid out the essential moral challenge that confronts us even now: Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealt…
Read More
…ged in my seat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre as I watched talented African American actors hamming up “African-ness” for cheap laughs. It brought to mind the long, shameful history of Americans—black and white—performing blackness (often in blackface) on stage for white audiences. The Book of Mormon wants to have it both ways. It wants to make fun of The Lion King and its African stereotypes by substituting more authentic stereotypes. It wants to…
Read More
…ptember 11th as examples of foreign threats being unsuccessful in breaking American resolve. However it’s far harder for Americans to reckon with the villain within. Whether it’s the Trail of Tears, American slavery, Japanese internment, or the half-century of race riots, these internal tragedies must be reconciled with a rhetoric of American innocence. This brings us to the terms like unity, forgiveness, hope and reconciliation which are frequent…
Read More
…ggles. Of course, the category of “working class” has been used throughout American history to describe White people. In reality, the American working class is racially diverse, and includes many BIPOC people. The 2021 American Community Survey shows: “Black, Hispanic, and other workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent.” But, as we shall see, the song doesn’t seem…
Read More
…have had, Seagle still deserved a bit more room to finish it. Ultimately, American Virgin is a missed opportunity. It never lives up to the promise of its opening pages, which hint at a thoughtful, complex critique of American religion that never really materializes. And a thoughtful, complex critique is exactly what is needed—the gun-toting messiahs and sneering preacher-villains that have become go-to clichés for comics that deal with religion…
Read More