Religion Dispatches
…itic Because They’re Anti-White: “A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews.” Isn’t now the time for communal awakening? Shouldn’t we look for leadership from the recent initiative of Jews pledging support for cooperatives in the South as part of a campaign to commemorate 50 years since the Mississippi Freedom Summer? And from the 30 American Rabbis who went to march in Ferguson right after the high holidays this…
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…not uncommon for groups to blend elements of both Judaism and Islam in the 1920s, as in the 1970s. I think African American adoption of both religions are variants of Black thought about “the East,” and deserve to be thought of as Black forms of Orientalism—not in a pejorative sense, but in an affirmative and romantic sense. So at one point the book was at least twice as long, before I decided that the Islam/Orientalism piece needed to be a book…
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…ottschalk said, “using the best tools they have. And those, in the minds of 18th and 19th century Brits, are scientific tools.” Around the same time that Carolus Linnaeus was developing a taxonomic system for organisms, authorities were coming up with ways to categorize their subjects based on body and belief. Social scientific classifications have a tendency to eclipse the way that people define themselves. They also have a tendency—which you can…
Read More…ly between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience. By way of proposition and broad outline, I want to suggest three conversational pivots for that kind of discussion: 1) The first is the historical interchange between religion and technology. It is useful, I think, to step aside for a moment from the religion-science nexus and to foreground the religion-technology relati…
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…e Greenwood neighborhood met a far grimmer fate. From May 31st through June 1st 1921, the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma was decimated in what has come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, often considered the worst race riot in American history. However, this event has long only been remembered in Black newspapers and magazines such as Jet and Ebony, taught in history courses at historically Black colleges or Black Studies classes, and…
Read More…his is the consequence. Once you accept the historically flawed idea that “American” equals “Christian,” you of necessity must see “Muslim” as “anti-American.” Muslims do not accept the fundamental belief of Christianity, that Jesus was the Son of God and savior of the world. Thus, in this closed world view, they are “anti-Christian” and so are also inherently “anti-American.” This is one of the dangers of the increasingly prominent idea that the…
Read More…and theological subterfuge. The group is a strategic reincarnation of the American Anglican Council of Washington, a chapter of the American Anglican Council (AAC), the national body created in 1996 to oversee congregations that split with the Episcopal Church. As an organization independent of the Episcopal church, the AAC and its affiliates would have not have standing in the church to bring disciplinary charges. Trustees of the AFF have been a…
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…hroughout the 1970s; thanks in large part to pop culture phenomena like the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof and the 1978 television miniseries The Holocaust, which was broadcast eight months before “The Craftsman” on NBC. The Unlikely Shtetl of Walnut Grove While much of Mr. Singerman’s Jewish terminology seems calibrated to heighten his otherness within Walnut Grove—while stopping short of alienating the non-Jews who were the vast majority of the L…
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…onversations. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The American prison has become a disaster and a scandal in recent years. My book tries to show how powerfully the prison has shaped American culture over a longer history. The prison has been a source of gothic nightmares but also, more surprisingly, a scene where we have rehearsed some of our most cherished fantasies: about the individual’s capacity to remake himself or hersel…
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…ed in the wake of the very dark chapters in history that preceded them. In American history you get, at the very same time, the unfolding of the progressive movement and the strongest expression of the Ku Klux Klan at the beginning of the 20th century. What we know 100 years later is that the progressive movement actually won in that era. People turned around and said, ‘We don’t want to go there. That’s really bad.’ Sure enough, countermovements e…
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