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The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…ences. The second story unfolds in the late-nineteenth century when African-American Primitives reconstructed Calvinism’s withered frame to build an education movement grounded in what they described as their “hardshell” Calvinist identity: rugged yet flexible, durable yet capable of adaptation. This is a tale that has entirely escaped notice even though its burdens and aspirations tell us something new about African Americans, Calvinism’s complex…

New Poll Reveals Jews May Be Open to Change in Israel Policy

By Benjamin Weiner

…w more secure. And as for Iran, negotiators and hardliners are running neck-and-neck. The stakes are high. If President Obama attempts to take a harder line with Israel he risks alienating his Jewish base. At the same time, if American Jews are not willing to support the president, they risk a diminishment of their own political capital if he does it anyhow. The J Street data, if nothing else, indicates that there is at least the potential for col…

Duterte Cites Catholic Heritage in Opposing Marriage Equality, and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ministration dropped U.S. participation in hearings being held by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Philippines: President cites Catholic heritage in backtracking on marriage equality President Rodrigo Duterte, who has become infamous for a wave of extra-judicial killings carried out with his approval, said during his 2016 presidential campaign that he would consider signing legislation to legalize marriage by same-sex couples. But no…

Pat Robertson’s Women Warriors Leading Spiritual Warfare In Zimbabwe

By Sarah Posner

…rdoba House), piling on a right-wing campaign to portray the effort as anti-American and supportive of terrorism. “God’s Timing” Bourland was the point person in the establishment of the African Centre for Law and Justice in Harare, which she calls a “footprint” for other ACLJ efforts on the continent. The sequence of events that led Bourland to ask Jordan Sekulow to travel with her to Zimbabwe and ultimately set up the African Centre for Law and…

Unreleased Religious Freedom Manifesto Isn’t the Culture War Compromise It Hopes to Be

By Frederick Clarkson

…f the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project” in 2016. All of which is to say that this appears to be a distinction without a difference. Given the 8 years of work hosted at Georgetown that overlapped with and led to the creation of the RFI and drafting of the American Charter—not to mention the overlap in key figures, affiliations, and funding sources—the suggestion that Georgetown University and its Berkley Center isn’t implicated in the Ame…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…ing apart. We tag along as he learns about the violent symbolism of the all-black American flag; visits Lauren Boebert’s infamous “Shooters” restaurant (where waitstaff carry guns); speaks to people who’ve turned their unprocessed grief into anger and violence; and listens to sermons that speak of a coming war. Having met Jeff in person for the first time a year ago when we sat on a panel at a conference on White Christian nationalism at Yale Univ…

The Irony of the American Studies Israel Boycott

By Jon Pahl

…ghout the twentieth-century from U.S. policies that have created a military-University-financial system that is arguably as inequitable, brutal, militaristic, and unjust as the one in Israel? I can think of at least one Jew who talked about seeing the speck in another’s eye and missing the log in one’s own when calling out injustice, which is ironically relevant to this misguided resolution. Arbitrariness and irony aside, though, my charge that th…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…wn Muslims). In fact, the largest single ethnic group of Muslims is African-Americans. The single mis-represented or under represented group of Muslims however is still African Americans. You would think that white Americans who converted to Islam and raised families as Muslim would be the most under represented. But there has been a long standing fascination by “Brown” Muslims with white America so white Americas who become Muslim are often cast…

The Left Behind: Why Are White American Christians So Racist?

By Daniel Schultz

…, the truth is, the church, like any human institution, changes and adapts to present circumstances, sometimes better than others. Given the magnitude of the changes being currently experienced in American society, the best hope for white American Christianity might be to just leave it all behind, and wait to see what new thing God will bring about in its place….

What Do We Mean By ‘Judeo-Christian’?

By Shalom Goldman

…st media personality who identifies himself as an Orthodox Jew, published a 19-part series on “Judeo-Christian Culture.” In his introduction Prager wrote that: [O]nly America has called itself Judeo-Christian… but what does Judeo-Christian mean? We need to know. Along with the belief in liberty—as opposed to the European belief in equality, the Muslim belief in theocracy, and the Eastern belief in social conformity—Judeo-Christian values are what…