Religion Dispatches
…es. In many ways, it sets the stage for and goes beyond the open letter to American Muslims published by Reza Aslan and Hassan Minhaj here on RD. According to the ISPU report, there is a deep desire by American Muslims to return to a religious imagination that isn’t bounded by simple legal edicts, but which calls forth the best of a person through a Prophetic example. As a result, one can no longer see mosques operating in isolation from American…
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…r in the lifetime of anyone present here, has the religious liberty of the American people been as threatened as it is today.” So it’s hardly surprising that at his address to the breakfast Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence, who was introduced by Anderson, played to the crowd, touting the Trump administration’s executive order on “religious liberty” and plans to eviscerate the contraceptive mandate: President Trump stands for the religious libert…
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…t the founders were moral without religion. It also means they founded the American government on their own morality, not religion,” concluding that “Barr is inadvertently refuting his entire argument by trying to co-opt Adams.” Seidel’s work can also help us see that Barr is twisting Tocqueville in his attempt to marshal the nineteenth-century French observer of American democracy in support of his view that moral behavior is impossible without r…
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…rying to explain our community’s legitimacy—or lack thereof—to the “wider” American and “mainstream” Jewish world. But this drama of American Jewish history is actually nothing new. Whether in the form of debating the Hebrew traditions of Olaudah Equiano, Mordecai Noah’s vision of a multi-racial Zionism or the relationship of Judaism to the non-White relatives of people like Judah Benjamin, David Yulee or Judah Touro, from the Colonial period to t…
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…ot so much for the general public, but to translate things that are by non-Americans for American scholars and a public that’s not the same public as New York Times readers. This is something that struck and surprised me: how much translation there is in each of the sub-theological worlds of North America. Knowing and being able to read in one language says nothing of the real access to the idea of coming from that linguistic world. We know that t…
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…would tout that as his motivation for trying to align himself with African-Americans—and ultimately even identifying as African-American. He was the first white person in the state of Indiana to adopt a black child. He always had people of color around him in the early days, and he was quite vocal about pushing back against Jim Crow ideology. He was an orderly in a hospital that refused to treat black patients, and he protested against that. He al…
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…hose people seek to preserve the age-old traditions and spiritual values.” American Religious Right groups like the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the National Organization for Marriage are among those who take a global approach to the culture war, and work closely with their counterparts in Europe through overseas operations and alliances like the WCF. Many Religious Right groups are supporting the Mum, Dad &…
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…mething closer to genre fiction—yet another gothic horror story. A Book of American Martyrs Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, February 2017 Religion, in Oates’s novel, is weird in the sense that H.P. Lovecraft’s tales are weird, or like Macbeth‘s “weird sisters” who prophesy doom. Religion, for Oates, appears here as a dark, intellectually inchoate force that motivates people with terror and toward violence, a source of fear but also of frightful strength….
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…haped Conservative Christianity, examines how Christian businessmen imbued American corporations with religious meaning and how free-enterprise ideology and market-based solutions in turn shaped 20th-century evangelical institutions. RD’s Neil J. Young recently spoke with Grem about the book. _________ As you point out, we have a robust history of how conservative evangelicals shaped American politics in the 20th century, but the history of evange…
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…lesbians. On the outside there is the rise of political Islam before which American geo-politics have been relatively ineffective. Trump is racializing the American nation. But conservative evangelicals are not white nationalists; they are Christian nationalists: Only as a people chosen by God can America stand strong. A majority of Republican voters subscribe to the view that Islam is fundamentally contradictory to Western values. For old-guard c…
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