Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…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…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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…f television and visual culture. Standing like a blonde icon of white male American power, his good looks and message would carry him all over the world as a representative of American power and the nation’s Christian faith. Graham’s preaching and evangelistic crusades are what many will remember him for, but Graham’s unique position as an exceptional articulator of American political power is equally a part of his legacy. This was on display when…
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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…bill, read Jeff Sharlet’s chilling C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. Sharlet’s meticulous reporting on Bahati himself and the role of American religious advocates in the politics around the Anti-Homosexuality Bill and homophobia in general in Uganda is absolutely indispensible. Human Rights First gave its annual award last year to activist Julius Kaggwa for his advocacy for sexual minorities in Uganda. When I interviewed…
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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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…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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…ership of Mormon Church president Brigham Young, the ordination of African-American men ceased, African-American men and women were prohibited from temple worship, and intermarriage was officially discouraged. Some historians believe that Young’s about-face on the status of African Americans may have been motivated by embarrassment stemming from an 1847 scandal involving an excommunicated African-American Mormon named William McCary, or by politic…
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…rnalists repeated government lies about things like the Vietnam War to the American people. As Americans lost faith in their media, they became more open to the idea of liberal bias. That widespread suspicion of mainstream journalism created a space for conservative media to grow while promoting the notion of liberal media bias. This is how we wound up where we are today, with a plurality of Americans believing media are biased toward liberalism,…
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