Religion Dispatches
…faith groups, Muslims are looking for ways to raise families and live the American dream. Today, the American Muslim community feels like all Americans do: outraged, betrayed, and demanding justice be served quickly. Zeenat Rahman is even more personal: I went to the mosque today, to observe the ritual Friday prayer. I prayed for the souls of the victims and for their families, not because the alleged perpetrator is Muslim, but because as a Musli…
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…the others, it’s claimed, aren’t “real Christians”—and therefore not “real Americans.” Christian and American identities are inseparable in Christian nationalism, merged into one another. At the same time, blood and soil are central to this ideology. This focus stems, as Yale sociologist Philip Gorski describes, from drawing a parallel between the Bible’s conquest of the Holy Land by the Israelites, and the violent conquest of the American contine…
Read More…erence. However, we know both of these traditions are too foreign for most Americans, despite the fact that Jesus was Jewish and Morocco was one of the first countries to recognize American independence. No, the sophistication of language I refer to is the one of nuance. The curse that has plagued the coverage of Islam since the Iranian Revolution, that it is one monolithic religion, is really the plague on religion coverage in general. Over these…
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…n Without Tarrying for Any!” foreshadowed Freedom Now! The Sixties were as American as apple pie or that great American hippie Johnny Appleseed. 3. Given the reality of the socially constructed cages we are trapped in, the Matrixes which we accept unknowingly, we have two choices. We can either make the cage as comfortable as can be for as many people equally as possible; Or we can try to break out of the cage, break out of the text, break out of…
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…the first African-American president—and then the first African- and Asian-American woman Vice President. They have seen the Supreme Court strip school-mandated Bible reading, prayer, and so-called “creation science” from public schools, even as evolution became standard fare. They have watched feminism challenge gender roles, and the Supreme Court legalize abortion and mixed-race marriage and then same-sex marriage. They feared losing their child…
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…economy that provided most people with at least the hope of sharing in the American dream.” However, the justification for American values and ideals were no longer fixed, so Marsden maintains, in a higher law or ideology. The American Enlightenment ideal of a universal order had been replaced by a philosophy of pragmatism and moral relativism that stressed individual self-fulfilment. This would make a common program for reform impossible. Marsden…
Read More…ng brought into America by people from backwards countries threatening our American way of life. As Americans of mixed heritage, we grew up hearing stories about how our Jewish grandparents faced similar prejudice in the early 20th century and how our Irish ancestors faced more of the same when they arrived in the mid-19th century. Chinese workers faced even harsher legal restrictions with the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese-Americans were inte…
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…is Present Darkness, a small all-American town becomes the epicenter of an international conspiracy to purchase the town’s local college. The conspiracy is opposed by the town’s fundamentalist Christians, who are the only ones who understand that the machinations that seem to join psychology professors, New Age gurus, and liberal (non-fundamentalist) ‘Christians’, are actually the work of demons operating at Satan’s behest. Like Paula White stridi…
Read More…traced all the way back to slavery. Even today the only place the African-American community who are adults can meet if they want to have a meeting in a predominantly African-American community is a church. Our Civil Rights history was born in the Baptist church, but our enslavement was also born in the Baptist church. Pastor Pickens has been given until March 4th to respond to the church tribunal. Letters of support can be sent to his attentio…
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…lism is, counter to Noble Drew Ali’s original teachings, incompatible with American citizenship—as having the “primary objective” of “connect[ing] African Americans with a proud heritage, thereby circumventing the stereotypical picture of Africa, its inhabitants, and their black American descendants as savage and uncivilized.” This makes the religion, with its embrace of Orientalist imagery and esoteric texts, sound more like the African-centered…
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