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Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…thority in question will cede way (in other words you block the aisles for a 10 hour flight, or you file lawsuits and cost the government time and money defending the law you tried to convince it not to pass, and then once you get an accommodation you sue to be exempted from that as well). The real difference here is that if you don’t want to deal with ultra-Orthodox men interfering in your travel, you can just take another airline. If only it wer…

Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

The Book of Mormon cleaned up at this year’s Tony Awards, winning nine of the 14 awards it was nominated for, including Best Musical. But tonight’s success is hardly unexpected, capping off, as it does, an extraordinary season of critical adulation. What’s going on? Why has a good-not-great religious satire from the creators of South Park received rapturous praise from the whole canon of media tastemakers? It may be true that The Book of Mormon i…

The Role of Spirit in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: A Conversation with Activist and Artist Patrisse Cullors

By Hebah H. Farrag

…ne of the nation’s top civil rights leaders by Los Angeles Times, named a NAACP History Maker in 2015 and one of the three founders of #BlackLivesMatter, Cullors is a person dedicated to not only transforming how her community is treated, but how her community organizes and understands itself. She is a queer polyamorous practitioner of Ifà, a religious tradition from Nigeria, and a person many people turn to not only as a political leader but as a…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…ivil rights activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Th…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…papers themselves, and the people who made them, that inspired me to write a book about the early black press. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation Benjamin P. Fagan University of Georgia Press June 2016 Initially, though, this was going to be a book about the ways in which black newspapers theorized and enacted American national identity. But as I read and reread the pages of Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, the Provi…

Coming Out Twice: Sexuality and Gender in Islam

By Susan Henking

…ality and transgender behavior in Islam. I’m speaking of the United States academy here, but similar things were happening in the global network of university inquiry. Islamic Studies used to happen under the rubric of “Orientalist Studies” which was mainly philological and text-based, and was carefully sealed off from wider currents of cultural criticism. But in the 1980s, scholars began to take Islamic Studies out of this narrow field and merge…

Complicating the Prosperity Gospel Story: A Microeconomics of Pentecostalism, International Edition

By Naomi Haynes

…d the blessings they were hoping to receive from God, the difficulties of managing church and denominational budgets, and worries that pastors favored believers who had more money. All of this was being worked out in a temperamental extraction economy, which has gone through several cycles of boom and bust since I first began working on the Copperbelt in 2003. This macroeconomic background made the microeconomics of Pentecostalism even more intere…

Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder

By Lisa Webster

…e a church for everyone. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice right away. Just another black church in a down-and-out urban neighborhood. But then you look to your left, at the gangly transgender woman with tattoos; or at the band, up by the stage, with a drummer who looks like singer Nona Hendryx; or at the choir director, in shiny satin, and it begins to dawn on you: radically inclusive. Not just words. I met with Yvette Flunder in her of…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…S this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was in transition but largely intact. Some 40 percent of Catholics went to mass in any given week and there were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests and 135,000 nuns, with the natio…

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…y Shlomo Sand (Verso, 2009) First published in Hebrew as Matai Ve’ekh Humtzaa Ha’am Hayehudi (Resling, 2008) In the preface to this book’s English-language edition, Tel Aviv University historian Shlomo Sand describes the “odd” reception that his book engendered on its publication in Israel: journalists were interested, academics enraged: Representatives of the “authorized” body of historians fell on the book with academic fury, and excitable blogg…