Religion Dispatches
…as a small, partisan, outlier chapter in a much bigger story of friendship cemented by Republican Party officials traveling to Israel with the American Family Association and the American Renewal Project….
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…er people. At various points, you cite an anti-establishment streak in the American temperament. Would you say that Americans are generally too quick to disbelieve official accounts and too quick to believe alternative theories? Yes, I think that is precisely correct, and I think it is in large measure a result of the nation having been born of the Enlightenment and of fervent Christianity. These are flipsides, too. This extreme credulity and extr…
Read More…iritual and cultural celebration. It also doesn’t help that the origins of American Catholicism, like any other mostly white denomination, is stained by its racist past. The earliest American bishops defended slavery and even urged the Vatican to recognize the Confederacy; and for a long time, African Americans were rejected by most seminaries and convents. Roman Catholicism has attempted to course-correct since then—a friend once referred to Pope…
Read More…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…
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…problem as a result of a spiritual degradation afflicting not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and, as their material claims, “Hispanics.” These populations. they reason, comprise the “real” tribes of Israel and are suffering from a trans-generational set of curses that includes a “loss” of their real ethnic identity and religion. Historian Sylvester Johnson refers to this as the “ethnic turn” in early twentieth-century Black reli…
Read More…r for the benefit of House staffers, and spoke to a room of about 50 people. It surely is a deeply troubling development that King is cavorting with Gaffney and pontificating about the “Americanism” of American Muslims, in light of Gaffney’s agitation about fifth columns of shari’ah proponents bent on undermining the Constitution….
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…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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