Religion Dispatches
…cob, Lynn Hunt, Henry Yu, and others. I wanted to thickly describe African American Judaism from microhistorical, Black Atlantic, and African American Studies perspectives. The question of “authenticity” that had dominated the accounts of so many white Jews was of little interest to me. What had gone missing in the limited literature on the topics was an attempt to tell the story of Black Israelites as an instance of African American history (in t…
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…s of jest. This approach is analogous to that of the traditionally African-American Krewe of Zulu. Scholars of American Jewish humor often draw parallels with traditions of African-American humor, and the comparison between Krewe du Jieux and the Krewe of Zulu is an easy one. Zulu has a longer and deeper history in the city, originating in a social aid and pleasure club, which is a form of social service organization that emerged to serve the need…
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…the United States, where there are substantial Arab-American, South Asian-American, African-American, and Latino Muslim populations. Still, the subtext of a lot of political rhetoric about Islam is that there’s some characteristic Muslimness that inheres in the body, regardless of heritage. “The whole question is, who exactly are Muslims?” asks Zareena Grewal, a professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale and the author of Islam I…
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…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…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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…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…ported a conscience vote on the issue. Uganda: Pride supported by US while American evangelicals promote homophobia U.S. embassy officials took part in Pride activities in Kampala last week and last weekend, reports the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers. Activist Richard Lusimbo praised the Obama administration’s “very beneficial” diplomatic efforts promoting LGBT human rights and slammed American evangelicals who continue to promote anti-gay atti…
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…ters especially in southern states is a phenomenon suggesting the power of American Christianity to shape American electoral patterns. Black religious lives matter when the votes are tallied. ______________________________ Who is the “We”? Yolanda Pierce Professor of African American literature and religion at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity & the African American Spiritual Narrative The frenz…
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…prising, strange, unexpected return of conservative Christianity meant for American literature in the last half century or so. The book’s argument is that the social resurgence of conservative Christianity is one of the most important transformations in the U.S. religious landscape in the last several decades, and that this is the context within which we need to understand religiously inflected fiction. We had been led astray by what social scient…
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…James as a spiritual matriarch. My hoped-for audience also includes Native American Mormons as well as the descendants of Native Americans whom the Mormons displaced, enslaved, and killed to make way for their Zion in the Great Basin. I hope all Mormons who read the book see their history fairly depicted, even (or especially) if they find this history unsettling. Second, my intended audiences are other scholars of race and religion in American his…
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