Religion Dispatches
…ere enslaved Africans. There has been a renaissance of Islam among African Americans; indeed, African American Muslims are a large minority of the American Muslim population. Obama fumbled an opportunity to educate the American people, to complicate the image of who Muslims are, to accent their long, pre-Boston Tea Party, pre-revolutionary history in America. What better way to exemplify the new politics he claims to embody? Item: Two Muslim women…
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…h I write about more in my forthcoming book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History—helps to explain how Americans can see such different regions of the world as capable of being grouped together under the same heading, while seeing their own nation as categorically different and superior. Most Americans don’t talk about “heathens” anymore. But when Donald Trump talks about “shithole countries,” we know all too well what he means. It’s jus…
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…nforces the stakes of the game, as well as the centrality of the ritual in American life. With the names of the dead scrolling behind them, U2 performed on a heart-shaped stage surrounded by patriotic symbols of the American nation—a poignant, heartbreaking image in a night full of ritual acts for the dead and social solidarity, including the raising of a World Trade Center flag by a group of New York City firemen. According to some reports, the r…
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…ere it’s set. In the last few years, South Asians—often touted as a model American minority, like Asian Americans more generally—have featured much more frequently on television, giving some networks the look of college campuses. There’s Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation), Aasif Mandvi (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Danny Pudi (Community) and now a whole show about ethnically ambiguous brown people who are not Latino. As if Nikki Haley’s hybr…
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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…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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…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…
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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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…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…
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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…
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