Religion Dispatches
…, 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….
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…at over 500 pages, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy 2 is the result of a career spent dredging the swamp of the American Far Right—and with it, nights attending militia meetings, days muddling through White nationalist demonstrations, and countless hours scouring fascist message boards. Through these efforts, Neiwert has built the most incisive, compelling, and accurate look at the Trump movement’s fringes…
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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…
Read More…sh’s appearance. But he also argued that the recent landmark Pew survey of American Jews “suggests that the real problem the American Jewish community faces is the voluntary departure of Jews from Judaism. As Jonathan Tobin recently wrote in Commentary, the key takeaway from the Pew study is the degree to which American Jews are choosing not to live as Jews. The departure of Jews from Judaism via forced conversion pales before the voluntary abando…
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…nce on prosecuting the war in Iraq even after the 2006 elections, when the American people made it clear that they wanted out. Are the American people really that irrelevant, that you can wait a full week to bother to tell us why you got us into another war before we’re even out of Iraq and Afghanistan? 2) I am rightly made uneasy by conflicts with no obvious goal. The United States, like every other institutional body that has interests in the…
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…easy resale. Happy-faced entrepreneurial preachers have been a part of the American landscape since the first circuit riders hit the frontier villages. Even today, there’s no difference between Mike Lindell and a dozen televangelists, save a thousand milligrams of lithium. If you have any doubts about the commodification of the healing grace of God, google it for yourself. There’s a part of American Christianity that believes deeply and sincerely…
Read More…d for Religion Dispatches in October, behind the rhetorical bunting of the American Charter lies an effort to press the best of American democratic aspirations into the service of the religious and political agenda of the Christian Right and the Roman Catholic Bishops. These things said, good faith efforts to seek compromise on difficult issues at the heart of our nation’s most democratic values, and to achieve greater civility in public life are…
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…
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…(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…r for the benefit of House staffers, and spoke to a room of about 50 people. It surely is a deeply troubling development that King is cavorting with Gaffney and pontificating about the “Americanism” of American Muslims, in light of Gaffney’s agitation about fifth columns of shari’ah proponents bent on undermining the Constitution….
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