Search for "American Customer Service 1800-299-7264 Number For Reservations"

Don’t Worry, Be Happy: How Amazon, Google & Neuroscience Threaten American Buddhism

By Curtis White

…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…

This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

By Jeff Sharlet

…t is the principle of the thing with George, and, moreover, being a native American and a veteran of the last war, he has a rather narrow prejudice against being ordered around by guys who talk like they just got off the boat.” Spelvin’s borough of bubbleheads sounds more like Brooklyn than Mayberry. His anxieties, his bigotries—organized labor, immigrants—are those most commonly attendant to urban living. Even his name is a sly joke for working c…

YouTube Terrorism

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…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…

Does It Matter If Islam Is A Religion? An American Ahmadi Explains The Effects Of Religious Discrimination

By Daniel Schultz

…s are not just administrative: Ahmadis have a “glass ceiling” in the civil service, and discriminatory use of voter registration lists (Ahmadis are enrolled separately) keeps them from participation in elected government, even in areas where they are the overwhelming majority. From there it spreads through society in ways both perverse and corrupt, according to Ahmad: a non-Ahmadi colonel’s career is ended because his staff driver attended an Ahma…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…bel, it turns out, was responsible for ousting Hargis from the Tulsa-based American Christian College (founded to teach “anti-communist patriotic Americanism”) after Hargis was embroiled in a sex scandal; Hargis was accused of having sex with four male and one female students; the woman, it turned out, married one of the men in a ceremony officiated by Hargis, and the couple found out on their honeymoon that he had had sex with both of them. But i…

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

By Haroon Moghul

…irmed the importance of what I was doing. I needed to see this for myself. Americans, and American Muslims especially, need to know how certain interpretations of professedly apolitical Christianity become allied to a far-right agenda of foreign wars and domestic austerity, glorifying the rich while demonizing the poor. Political Christianity’s treatment of Islam is one of the few points, and perhaps the only point, at which right-wing, political…

The ‘Unified Reich’ Scandal is a Feature Not a Bug of Trump’s Brand of American Fascism

By Annika Brockschmidt

…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…

New World A-Coming: How Black Religion Helped Shape Racial Identity

By Judith Weisenfeld

…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…

House Made of Words: Momaday’s Novel Turns 40

By Michael A. Elliott

…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…

Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars

By Paul Wallace

…the inclusion of the Ground Zero cross in the 9/11 memorial museum In July American Atheists filed a lawsuit against those who planned to display a cross-shaped piece of wreckage at the 9/11 memorial. In their statement, American Atheists said that the cross was a reminder to Christians “that their God, who couldn’t be bothered to stop the Muslim terrorists or prevent 3,000 people from being killed in his name, cared only enough to bestow upon us…