Religion Dispatches
…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…
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…bove timelines, should shock precisely no one. Christian nationalists, who number at least half of surveyed Americans, believe that America’s exceptional blessings depend on policing spiritual, geopolitical, and racial boundaries. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, authors of the book Taking America Back for God, found in a recent study that Christian nationalism was usually a “top predictor” of whether a person “find[s] nothing racist about calli…
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…s calls “the happiness industry.” Not surprisingly, this is something many Americans are eager to hear: mindfulness can give you sukha vedana, that “happy feeling.” Putting aside the metaphysical question of what in the world we mean by the word “happiness,” there’s the anterior fact that Buddhism isn’t about becoming happy. Happiness and unhappiness are what the Buddha called “Worldly Winds,” like success and failure, gain and loss. Buddhism’s in…
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…lation of Haiti is somewhere around thirty percent. In Port-au-Prince that number jumps to almost forty percent. The majority of these churches are Pentecostal. These churches are overwhelmingly independent, indigenous Haitian entities, though some are linked to North American denominational Pentecostal churches. Haiti, along with Jamaica and Puerto Rico, is home to one of the fastest growing Pentecostal populations in the Caribbean. As I watch th…
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…e of duty for the first time in 33 years. Three others perish with him. An American consulate is destroyed. At the same time, an American flag is torched, while another diplomatic post, an embassy, is stormed in a neighboring Arab Muslim country. Days later, further outbursts against American officials and diplomatic sites occur in two other Arab Muslim countries. The headlines are here stripped of their local names, not to protect the innocent bu…
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…er of the community. Ahmadis consider themselves fully Muslim, and to most American eyes they would be indistinguishable from any other Muslim denomination. But this self-understanding is highly contested within Islam. They have been described as the “Quakers of Islam” because of their commitment to pacifism, social equality, and democratic self-governance. They have also been frequent targets of violence and persecution, particularly in their hom…
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…m going to look you in the eyes and I’m gonna tell you the future. It’s an American story, and that’s why Americans are gonna love it. People are going to build you up, and, God, are they going to, because when you’re great and new, we love you. Man, we’ll build you up into something that doesn’t even exist. You’re going to change the world. But you know what? Once they’ve built you as high as they possibly can, they’re gonna tear you back down—it…
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…ocal politicians and Jewish groups. Jews represent only two percent of the American population, but over sixty percent of American males are circumcised—and Jews are not the only religious group that practices circumcision. American Muslims do as well. Six years ago, in a similar challenge, the Association for Genital Integrity, a Canadian advocacy group, sought public funding to initiate a campaign to outlaw circumcision in Canada. As the Canadia…
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…beautifully written and offer penetrating analysis of race, the arts, and American identity. What’s your next book? I’m just getting started on a book about the intersections of race, African American religions, and psychiatry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. I’m interested in the way that psychiatric theory framed African and African diaspora religious practices in relation to ideas about normal and disordered mi…
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…ulitzer initiated the first period in US literary history in which “Native American literature” (or “American Indian literature”—take your pick) would be widely recognized as such. The readers of 1968 were ready for Momaday. In the years that followed, Vine Deloria Jr.’s manifesto of Indian self-determination, Custer Died for Your Sins, became a surprise bestseller, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee swept the nation with its trenchant…
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