Religion Dispatches
…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….
Read More
…ise the biblical creation myth to the level of a universal fact that every American, or at least every American student using Texas textbooks, must accept as truth. On the other hand, some biologists along with neuroscientists, psychologists, and other intellectuals see evolutionary theory and knowledge about the brain as a way to better understand that most basic of religious elements: morality. 8. Sports Values: Where do Americans get their mora…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…a successful monument makes it hard to imagine its setting without it. The American Atheists monument fails on both counts. When granted the opportunity to memorialize atheism in a public place, American Atheists decided to install a bench. In one sense, this is a clever idea, in that it reflects the utilitarian impulse of American atheism. But a bench is also something that you put your butt on. And this particular bench is an eyesore. About five…
Read More
…, 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….
Read More
…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
…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…
Read More
…(in the midst of an already ferocious insurgent war) in Iraq produced huge numbers of weekly attacks and casualties, averaging 2,000 attacks per month. The numbers then dropped dramatically as ethnic cleansing was completed in many areas, the “surge” of U.S. forces restricted the flow of explosives into Baghdad, the Mahdi Army suspended its attacks, and the U.S. co-opted Sunni insurgents. But violence has spiked again recently; it’s a perilous bus…
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…
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…
Read More