Religion Dispatches
…n important route into Islam at the end of the 20th century for more white Americans. African Americans came to Islam at the beginning of the 20th century, for various reasons. African Americans are minorities within the American Sufi communities. These communities are mostly populated by white Americans and the should-be-hyphenated-Muslim immigrants and their descendants. I don’t consider Sufism about race politics. In addition, generally these c…
Read More…pay for it.” The audience roared with laughter, but “Jan,”* who is Korean American, and her Mexican-American husband, ushered their children out of the service. Jan asked her pastor for a public apology. When he shrugged off her request, she was shocked. He had been a spiritual guide for years. He officiated the funeral of her son. But now it was as if they didn’t know each other. She resigned from her role in the children’s ministry, and her fam…
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…rican,” one that pitted the American creed of freedom and equality against American reality. An American Dilemma was an anti-racist opus; it was cited in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision; one of Myrdal’s collaborators on the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s…
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…vernment is being run by ‘‘perverted Satan-worshipers who insult the great American nation.” In Kenya, evangelical Bishop Mark Kariuki (who has direct links to Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice) challenged Kenyans to “know that the U.S. is not God.” And Kenya’s Deputy President, William Ruto, reportedly called on both Christians and Muslims in Kenya to fight against “dirty things,” saying, “Homosexuality is against the plan of Go…
Read More…s Fox Piven, Bill Ayers and others in a complex diabolical plot to subvert American capitalism. Bowers’ film shows handwritten charts, which endeavor to demonstrate that Gramsci, who died in 1937, has played a crucial role in the trajectory of the American left, leading to the election of Barack Obama. As Fischer, who nonetheless relies on the same demonizing, scapegoating ideology, protests, Breivik doesn’t share his view of Christianity or his s…
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…me and success, the black gospel choir became synonymous in the mainstream American imagination with the sound of overcoming historical injustice. The Warm Glow of the Gospel Aura Ever since then, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Anglo-American pop culture has been drawn to the use of black gospel choirs as a means of accessing the vast cultural capital associated with this music. When a black gospel choir willingly participates in mainstream American…
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…tudies. I also kept in mind not only a broader academic audience—including American studies, political theory, cultural studies, and American history, for example—but a general reading public and students as well. The book is still, in its tone and in its aims, emphatically an academic monograph, but I hope that the writing is accessible enough to appeal to readers generally interested in the subject. Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give th…
Read More…d for Religion Dispatches in October, behind the rhetorical bunting of the American Charter lies an effort to press the best of American democratic aspirations into the service of the religious and political agenda of the Christian Right and the Roman Catholic Bishops. These things said, good faith efforts to seek compromise on difficult issues at the heart of our nation’s most democratic values, and to achieve greater civility in public life are…
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…ere it’s set. In the last few years, South Asians—often touted as a model American minority, like Asian Americans more generally—have featured much more frequently on television, giving some networks the look of college campuses. There’s Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation), Aasif Mandvi (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Danny Pudi (Community) and now a whole show about ethnically ambiguous brown people who are not Latino. As if Nikki Haley’s hybr…
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…nforces the stakes of the game, as well as the centrality of the ritual in American life. With the names of the dead scrolling behind them, U2 performed on a heart-shaped stage surrounded by patriotic symbols of the American nation—a poignant, heartbreaking image in a night full of ritual acts for the dead and social solidarity, including the raising of a World Trade Center flag by a group of New York City firemen. According to some reports, the r…
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