Religion Dispatches
…, the most openly religious American President of all time has inflicted the worst kinds of sacrilege on the body politic, and utterly underestimated the spiritual demands of growing numbers of Americans who are beginning to question his authority to shape how we remember the individual bodies who died under his command….
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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…
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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…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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…h I write about more in my forthcoming book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History—helps to explain how Americans can see such different regions of the world as capable of being grouped together under the same heading, while seeing their own nation as categorically different and superior. Most Americans don’t talk about “heathens” anymore. But when Donald Trump talks about “shithole countries,” we know all too well what he means. It’s jus…
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…ere enslaved Africans. There has been a renaissance of Islam among African Americans; indeed, African American Muslims are a large minority of the American Muslim population. Obama fumbled an opportunity to educate the American people, to complicate the image of who Muslims are, to accent their long, pre-Boston Tea Party, pre-revolutionary history in America. What better way to exemplify the new politics he claims to embody? Item: Two Muslim women…
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…at the construction could cause a rift between it and “even its closest allies.” The United States warned Israel it was sabotaging the peace process; Netanyahu in turn accused it of acting “against American values.” Ah, American values. John Cougar Mellencamp, the Beach Boys, the Benham brothers, and the great red dragon of Revelation as a driver of foreign policy….
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…elen Burroughs argue across some of the most tumultuous decades in African-American history over the responsibilities of churches and the effectiveness of African Americans’ religious commitments in the struggle for liberation. * * * Adele Oltman’s Sacred Mission, Wordly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia) blooms from a careful, revelatory reconstruction of the spiritual and economic lives of black…
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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…
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