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Homegoing: Historian Explores the World of African-American Funerals

By Joanna Brooks

…g and talking about To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African-American Way of Death, an important new book by George Mason University professor Suzanne Smith that explores the dignity, pageantry, and politics of African-American funeral practices. I asked Smith, whose first book examined Motown, to compare the role of music and the role of religion in African-American history: “I tend to see the role of music and the role of religion…

Gingrich on Obama’s “Kenyan, Anti-Colonial Behavior” and “American Exceptionalism”

By Sarah Posner

…it Martin Luther King’s dream? Or something else? It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a “new order for the ages.” A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating “a distinct species of mankind.” This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more u…

New Study: Three-Quarters of American Giving Goes to Religion

By Jay Michaelson

…ar causes than anyone else. Coming in the wake of the recent Pew Survey on American Jewish Life, these findings may shed new light on Jewish secularism, a trend which has greatly worried the Jewish establishment. Maybe the secular social-justice commitments of American Jews are a sign of Judaism’s success. So, most religious people are equally generous; they only give more than non-religious people because they give to religious organizations; and…

American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence

By Michael A. Elliott

…ation—that we have violated the earth and it is now taking its revenge. In American Fever, Hall’s narrator explains how these religious and secular apocalyptic visions dovetail. Evangelical Christians look to each new disaster, he writes, for signs of Judgment Day; Muslims look for the return of Christ as an Islamic prophet; and “eco-doomsayers assert that their own exciting views of catastrophe are rooted in science and measurable observation.” B…

Why No American Muslim Response to Torture?

By Hussein Rashid

…f Muslim-American organizations really see themselves as being part of the American landscape, they need to take part in American debates. If they only represent “us” than we will never be part of the community, we’ll be a special interest group that will have no impact on the American landscape. These groups ask for the country to recognize them, but they offer nothing in return. The fact that official policy was to torture people is a matter for…

Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

By Rachel Wagner

…he original game designers provided for the creation of additional levels, new characters, new environments, and scripted events. Some of the most popular platforms for machinima are Second Life, Halo, World of Warcraft, The Sims, and even Grand Theft Auto. Because of its self-reflective and journalistic style, Molotova Alva has been dubbed “the first documentary shot entirely in a virtual online platform.” The Second Life avatar who stars in the…

White Nationalist Ideology Shines Through at Elite MAGA Conference: Inside NatCon Part II

By Ben Lorber

…ony is hypocritically indulging in racial politics by stressing the “Anglo-American” character of American nationalism while simultaneously disavowing this racial grounding and insisting his project is non-racial. Both Brimelow and Greer complained that NatCon assiduously avoids defining their nationalism in racial or ethnic terms, grounding the ‘American nation’ instead in ostensibly non-racial strata of culture, creed, ideology or aspiration. An…

Sacred&Profane: On Sexual Diversity, Perversity, and Ecstasy

By Gary Laderman

…rection into the deepest reaches of popular and political cultures. The Stonewall uprising in New York City near the end of the decade placed gay and lesbian culture squarely in the public eye for good, even if the significant gay rights movement already in existence has now been largely forgotten—most notably The Mattachine Society. The list of pivotal moments in the history of sexuality is quite extensive, but the bottom line remains the same af…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…including it in the matrix of the larger narrative concerning the slide of American religion and politics towards Christian nationalism. Before the 1980s, American Orthodoxy was, almost exclusively, a religious tradition composed of immigrants and their descendants. However, beginning in the 1980s, there were an increasing number of converts to Orthodoxy, many of whom (though notably and importantly not all) came as refugees from debates of gender…

Gas For Two Bucks a Gallon? Bachmann Taps a Pipeline to the American Sacred

By Rosamond C. Rodman

…ne could not be blamed for thinking so. The Los Angeles Times reports that Americans spend almost 100 billion a year on new car purchases alone, not counting used car purchases or maintenance of existing cars. When gas costs $3.84, reports CNN/Time, Americans spend eleven cents out of every dollar on gasoline. On average, an American spends 72 minutes a day in a car, getting from place to place. In one sense, a car is just functional arrangement…