Religion Dispatches
…they could not afford oxcarts they pulled handcarts. They did what so many American peoples have done—they moved on and started over. This is a story so many Americans know: from the people of Cherokee, Muscogee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, forced by government edicts to march the “Trail of Tears”; the millions of African-American migrants who left the violence of the Jim Crow South to build the great industrial cities of the Northeast and Mid…
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…ony is hypocritically indulging in racial politics by stressing the “Anglo-American” character of American nationalism while simultaneously disavowing this racial grounding and insisting his project is non-racial. Both Brimelow and Greer complained that NatCon assiduously avoids defining their nationalism in racial or ethnic terms, grounding the ‘American nation’ instead in ostensibly non-racial strata of culture, creed, ideology or aspiration. An…
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…t in print will be as rich as reading it on the screen. Much of what makes American Fever tick is in the way that it can blur the fictional and real words of fear and illness. With its careful documentation and heavy use of hyperlinks, American Fever does not easily disclose which information about disease is true and which is not, and uncertainty sits at the core of the cultural anxiety it maps. The Manhattan setting of American Fever is the thic…
Read More…motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King’s dream? Or something else? It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a “new order for the ages.” A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating “a distinct species of mankind.” This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press con…
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…nds me that someone could write a book about religion and democracy in the American context without addressing faith community responses to the 9/11 attacks and the catastrophic War on Terror that ensued. Unless my memory totally fails me, American religious leaders were mainly supportive of the “dark side” measures Dick Cheney told us were necessary in order to protect us against the alien evildoers. Yes, we did see some sporadic faith-involved p…
Read More…k, like every other, bringing them forward as the spokesman for the Muslim American community. They shouldn’t be, any more than the president should be reaching out to them and utilizing them, I should say, as his go-to people. Gaffney’s claim that “in fact, any Muslim American organization in this country of any prominence is a Muslim Brotherhood front” is a complete lie. This, too, comes out of the Holy Land Foundation trial — in which the U.S….
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…hile a hostage. Not that it mattered. ISIS, unlike Ben Carson, treated the American Muslim as an American, which he most certainly was. Beheaded almost a year after his abduction, Peter’s funeral services were held in absentia in November 2014, in his native Indiana, and led by a Syrian imam. I’m sure the Kassigs will appreciate how Carson might think, given their son’s sacrifices for his country, he might not have been entirely American. It’s eas…
Read More…c story of America’s foundation. The conservative reads a tale about Anglo-American Protestant hegemony and the opening up of North American resources. But the radical, perhaps even the mystical interpreter, reads a more allegorically profound story about America as “Mother of Exiles,” a universal space that encompases all ethnicities, cultures, and religions precisely because of its universality. Arguments about the significance of the pilgrims b…
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…the bill, said it would not alter the country’s marriage laws. Australia: American activists engage over marriage referendum American anti-marriage-equality activist Jennifer Roback Morse was in Australia to strategize with opponents of same-sex marriage in advance of a national referendum on the topic. India: Openly gay Apple CEO meets with Prime Minister Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which Andy Towle…
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…an oxymoron and that they live on the “margins” of their communities. The numbers of “out” or publicly self-identified atheists of color are increasing. African American women are a vocal and visible part of this population. In the book I devote a considerable amount of time contrasting the cultural, social, and political concerns of African American atheists/humanists with that of white atheists allied with the New Atheist movement. I argue that…
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