Religion Dispatches
…all its ecstasies and disappointments, it is a journey to faith that began with the loss of it. [We are grateful to the author, editors, and publishers of All-American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim for permission to reprint this excerpt. —The Eds.]…
Read More…ds of American jobs—up to an estimated 127,000. That’s Muslim money buying American goods, creating American jobs. That’s us benefiting from growth in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. That’s the world growing together. The Muslim world’s democratic convulsions—Indonesia preceded the Arab world by roundabout a decade—are responses to economic lethargy, with booming populations ravenous for rights, dignity, and prosperity. In short, thank the world’s la…
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…e—ours. Both the supernormal and the paranormal were later picked up by an American writer of glorious talent and wicked humor named Charles Fort. Charles sat in the New York Public Library every day for decades, reading pretty much every periodical in French and English back to 1800 as he looked for reports of “super-constructions in the sky” (what we would now call UFOs) and paranormal people. He found plenty of both. In works like The Book of t…
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…nfluence of religion on our public square. Thus, in his quest to fashion a new American conservatism, Mr. Hochman misses the mark by concluding that religious conservatives are no longer a core demographic of the GOP. One of the categories scholars draw upon to understand how Christianity pervades American conservative politics is Christian nationalism. According to Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, Christian nationalism describes a cultural iden…
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…ions in Russia Spark Outrage as the Country Takes a Conservative Turn,” AP News, October 27, 2023. [35] Team, “New Year Address to the Nation.” [36] For the quote, see Team, “New Year Address to the Nation.” According to the 2021 Russian census, there are 193 different ethnic groups residing on the territory of Russia, with nearly 72 percent of the population identifying as ethnic Russians. [37] According to the 2021 census, Russian total populati…
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…kinned, purple-haired Jesus in the Sky with Diamonds stared soulfully from American newsstands—the Peter Max-style illustration for Time magazine’s cover story on “The Jesus Revolution.” Time dutifully informed Middle America that: Jesus is alive and well and living in the radical spiritual fervor of a growing number of young Americans who have proclaimed an extraordinary religious revolution in his name. […] Christian coffeehouses have opened in…
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…nistration,” Politico Magazine, November 3, 2023, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/03/american-moment-conservative-00124178. [50] Paul Dans, “Paul Dans: America’s President Can Only Remove 1% of the Administrative State,” interview by Steve Bannon, War Room, Rumble, September 2023, https://rumble.com/v3i71t8-paul-dans-americas-president-can-only-remove-1-of-the-administrative-state.html. [51] The Heritage Foundation, “Mandate for Lea…
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…ng together new gospels: this is another aspect of the New Age that is not new at all. New Science, Ancient Religion But the premise on which this text is built is new; one fascinating example of the complex interweaving of new scientific knowledge and ancient religious wisdom. The reason this book is called The Aquarian Gospel has to do with the (relatively) new modern science of astronomy. As Levi’s wife, Eva S. Dowling, explains in her introduc…
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…ngages more of a public audience. Currently the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Manseau has been writing with curiosity and verve about our spiritual ancestors for two decades now. A founder of Killing the Buddha alongside Sharlet, Manseau is a prodigious, prolific, immaculate prose-stylist who has explored everything from the Victorian combination of technology and occultism (Th…
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…ead belief in ghosts and spirits in America, the politics of race, African American religions, and New Orleans and/or Atlantic world history. I hope the book will be assigned in undergraduate and graduate classes, especially undergraduate. Beyond the academy and its classrooms, A Luminous Brotherhood will bring an academic analysis of Spiritualism to the popular audience. A recent Harris poll reported that 42 percent of Americans believe in ghosts…
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