Religion Dispatches
…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….
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…it misunderstands both the diversity of religious practice in contemporary American culture and the changing meaning of “practice” itself. Of course, we know that the pluralistic or even syncretistic, DIY nature of American religiosity allows for a range of practices that we could not reasonably expect researchers to either exhaustively catalogue or effectively measure. But there is significant data that invites at least an expansion of the catego…
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…worried at this moment about Jews in the progressive camp. This segment of American Jewry has struggled in the past with Gaza, dividing over whether to back Operation Cast Lead in 2008. Reservations about Israel’s use of force in Gaza have continued. In 2009, Yoffie called American Jewish critics of Cast Lead “morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve.” Yoffie’s words supporting what the Israeli m…
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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…
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…as such, but they show how Judaism is both normative and normatized in the American context. The American Jewish Committee did not have to sponsor them. Even the more recent ”The Original Kings of Comedy,” and “The Original Latin Kings of Comedy,” did not have institutional support of the type Allah Made Me Funny received. Again, I think it was necessary, but where do we go from here? How long can we have institutions propping up our cultural grow…
Read More…re prominent then (so, too, was the disturbing implication that indigenous Americans were Canaanites, and thus fit for destruction). The Civil War provided the American civil religion with a new dimension of more explicitly Christian symbolism: the original sin of human enslavement was overcome only through the punitive bloodbath of civil war and the Christ-like sacrifice of the blood of the then-US President, Abraham Lincoln (Gary Laderman’s impo…
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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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…vid Myers and Naomi Stolzenberg write in their upcoming book, Teitelbaum’s American fantasy; an American shtetl. In the street protests and general political activism in present day Hasidism we may be witnessing yet another iteration of Hasidism’s developing Americanism. While Hasidim have always supported political candidates and voted in relatively high numbers, most of the advocacy was primarily transactional; they supported candidates they tho…
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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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