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Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart

By Haroon Moghul

…out? Anything to make a social impact?” I had been on the Daily Show for a number of years at this point, and spoken to a lot of Islamophobes, people who had a lot of misinformation about Islam and Muslims. It was a personal thing to me, and it was an issue I thought I could lend my voice to in a satirical space. Were there any particular misconceptions or fears you wanted to address? There was a lot of stuff about Shari’ah Law, the protests again…

Thanksgiving Reveals More About Us Than About 17th Century Events

By Ed Simon

…pie. Surprisingly, all of the decades-long Thanksgiving advocacy prior to Lincoln’s proclamation never included any mention of the 1621 Pilgrim and Indian story, the basis of so many Thanksgiving pageants in the 1900s. The holiday came first, and the mythic 1621 event became a focus only later. *** America The Mythical: ‘Mother of Exiles’ or Denier of Safe Haven? Returning to the mythic conventions behind Thanksgiving—including the narrative whic…

Evangelicals, Oppose Park51 At Your Own Eschatological Risk

By Stephen V. Anderson

…llowing) a Mormon who promises the Restoration of Honor at the base of the Lincoln Memorial not only a false hope but an act of spiritual treason (Matthew 7:15)? Substituting the sacramental wine (or grape juice) with tea does not a literal or symbolic transubstantiated elixir make. So evangelical and/or fundamentalist pundits opposed to Park51: What say you? *The list of notable commentators and/or organizations espousing similar points of view…

GOP Does Not Stand For “Gay Old Party”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…, people across the religious and sociological perspective who are waiting for the GOP to be as grand as it once was – when it was the party of Lincoln – ending oppression and fighting for the common good….

Ebola and Us: The American Roots of Liberia’s Trauma

By Peter Laarman

…iety, made in the image of a stratified United States. Although they never numbered more than five percent of the country’s population, the Americo-Liberians ruled over the indigenous people (with occasional help from the U.S. Navy) for an astonishing 133 years—1847 to 1980. It was only the Samuel Doe-instigated bloody civil wars that finally toppled Little America. The catastrophic civil wars are what in turn left Liberia a profoundly broken plac…

How New Religions Are Made

By Jacob S. Dorman

…udies scholars who have questioned and refined “syncretism,” such as Bruce Lincoln, Charles Stewart, Rosalind Shaw, and A.J. Droge. The differences in the humanities now and then is at the heart of my critique of syncretism: Herskovits formed his theory of syncretism and the “acculturative continuum” in the 1920s and 30s. An awful lot has changed since then. We have moved away from culture as a set of “rigid, predictable, patterns,” as Herskovits…

History in the Making: Religion, Race and Gender in the Presidential Election

By Peter J. Paris

…until the end of the Civil War, more than one-half century afterward, with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (supported later by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments of 1865, 1868, and 1870, respectively). The brief Reconstruction period of 12 years ended abruptly in 1877 with an agreement that the Democratic votes of the former confederate states would support the election of the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, in return for his decision…

“You Lie!”: Messing with American Mass

By Ben Brazil

…titution and the Declaration of Independence; the awe that descends at the Lincoln Memorial—these are religious feelings. When Americans feel these things, when they feel lifted by the glow of the sacred that surrounds the symbols and rites of the nation, they feel bound to something bigger than themselves and bound together despite their differences. Or so the argument goes, more or less. In a nation that seems bereft of any unity, and that has a…

Putin Theo-Propaganda Minister Kirill Invokes 600 Years of History to Lay Claim to Ukraine — Here’s What it Means

By Katherine Kelaidis

…a question that has much more to do with our century than that of Abraham Lincoln. This is also, to be clear, a religious question. For many American Christians, particularly some American evangelicals and members of the Latter-day Saint movement, American history is as sacred and theologically charged as medieval and early modern Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern European history is for Orthodox Christians. If you believe in a God of History, yo…

Mauled by an Angel: Why Do Americans Need “God’s Secret Agents”?

By W. Scott Poole

…yet troubled baby-boomers adrift in a suburban wasteland of McMansions and Lincoln Navigators. Then along came The Prophecy with its terrifying, I’m-a-gonna-rip-your-face-off angels. Not far behind was Kevin Smith’s brilliant Dogma that dealt, in part, with a pair of fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) hoping for redemption. This pair keenly feels their separation from God and describes its effects in terms that St. Augustine could have wri…