Religion Dispatches
…have had, Seagle still deserved a bit more room to finish it. Ultimately, American Virgin is a missed opportunity. It never lives up to the promise of its opening pages, which hint at a thoughtful, complex critique of American religion that never really materializes. And a thoughtful, complex critique is exactly what is needed—the gun-toting messiahs and sneering preacher-villains that have become go-to clichés for comics that deal with religion…
Read More
…ainly targeted Catholic and Muslim Palestinians. This view was typical for American and European missionaries as well. In the American Christian imagination, Ottoman “Christianity and Islam were coupled,” Ussama Makdisi argues, “as the two pillars of temporal and spiritual corruption that had to be struck down.” Twain’s comic depictions of a desolate, barren, and neglected Palestine later serve as documentary evidence in both Christian Zionist and…
Read More…entity, although it may equally signal the priority of the Jewish over the American. “Jewish Americans,” while superficially equivalent to “Italian Americans,” has never enjoyed the same usage. In titling their PBS documentary The Jewish Americans, these filmmakers have therefore made a telling statement. After three and a half centuries of struggling to become American, the Jews have finally come “home” (incidentally, the title of part three of t…
Read More
…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…
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…
Read More
…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
…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…
Read More
…om their Americanness. Should American Jews be hyphenated citizens? Jewish-American or American Jew; hyphen or no hyphen. Jews as an ethnos, like Irish-Americans, or Jews as carrier of a religion, like American Catholics? The American Jew lives in the anxiety of the hyphen, and flourishes there. The hyphen allows for considerable leeway in terms of legitimate negotiation between one’s Jewish and American identity. Today it seems that the complex n…
Read More
…ggles. Of course, the category of “working class” has been used throughout American history to describe White people. In reality, the American working class is racially diverse, and includes many BIPOC people. The 2021 American Community Survey shows: “Black, Hispanic, and other workers of color make up 45 percent of the working class, while non-Hispanic white workers comprise the remaining 55 percent.” But, as we shall see, the song doesn’t seem…
Read More
…cans who would be more fitting (and less problematic) to symbolize Italian-American contributions to American society than an individual who never actually set foot in what is now the United States? Whether it’s the school-age yarn about proving the world wasn’t flat, or the daring and brave explorer setting out to find an alternate route to Asia for spices, to the more complex and unsympathetic readings, Columbus as origin myth is a Rorschach tes…
Read More