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Masculinity and Mass Violence: When Will We Acknowledge the Smoking Gendered Pronoun Hiding in Plain Sight?

…07 before turning the gun on himself; Jiverly Wong, a Buddhist, Vietnamese American who killed 13 people (himself included) and wounded four in Binghamton, New York in 2009; John Allen Muhammad, the Islamic, African American “Beltway Sniper,” who, with Jamaica-born partner Lee Boyd Malvo, killed at least 10 people in the Washington DC area through the month of October 2002. Many of these shooters, regardless of race or religion, had known mental h…

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“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

…e value the expressions of evangelical Christian piety so common among the American political class, and do not dismiss them—as many Americans do—as cynical political machination. Stories in respected media outlets warn of aggressive evangelical campaigns “emanating from America,” and “backed by the highest of the land,” and are often accompanied by sound bites or pictures—in this case of George W. Bush, Jr., speaking in front of a large mural of…

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Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

…have the chance to create something different. The final word goes to the American scholar of Judaica Jacob Neusner. In his 1981 book Stranger at Home: The Holocaust, Zionism, and American Judaism, Neusner argued that an obsession with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, painting the Jew as a victim—the foundation of American Jews’ civil religion—is essentially an act of Jewish self-hatred because it perpetuates derogatory Jewish stereotypes. The sol…

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Secure Borders? Not a Chance, Senator

…other side of this paradox, and the emphasis can change over time. Recent American history illustrates that point very well, as another scholar of American religions, Robert Wuthnow, demonstrates in After Heaven, a book that offers a unique, if indirect, insight into the current debate on immigration reform. Wuthnow first set out to understand the distinctive spiritual style of the 1950s. Reading the religious literature of that era and interview…

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An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

…together, chasing after money and the chance to strike it big—again, think American Wild West, for better and worse—you get… things that surprise you.   Or, at the least, things you do not expect. • • • • • • • •  ⬆ Before praying, Muslims perform a ritual ablution known as wudu’, which includes washing your feet. In many Western countries, this means the awkward moment when your colleagues find you barely balanced on one leg with your opposite fo…

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Bobby Jindal Hypes His Christian Cred at Liberty U.

…ten embarrassed to identify as a Hindu. I just wanted to be accepted as an American, because in this country, the dominant narrative has been—and continues to be—that being American implicitly (or explicitly) means being Christian. It’s likely why Barack Hussein Obama has had to repeatedly reaffirm his Christian bona fides. For Hindu kids, the dilemma of having to explain a “funny religion” can be traumatic, and the bullying that takes place—often…

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In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

…e fairy-tale story of irreversible progress in LGBT rights is a very white American story. Americans of color have long known that progress is not linear. LGBT people from countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, among others, can tell you what it feels like when attitudes make a U-turn. The laws in these countries are benign, compared to the many places in the world where homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment or even death, but tha…

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Keepers of History or Dangerous Idols: The Case Against Statues From an Unlikely Source

…eliminate the idea of America. The tie between memory and statuary is more American than Americans realize. Given that many Americans don’t know that the Civil War happened after the War of Independence, and that the president this week misidentified a sculpture while defending its importance to memory, it’s questionable whether our memorializing strategies have been all that successful in the first place. Given this dubious track record, we would…

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Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

…e the country in Christian terms—in this instance, to enforce the norms of American literary, sexual, and religious expression? 2) Would women—in this case, ambitiously learned ones like Craddock—be able to claim academic standing, spiritual authority, and social equality in American public life? 3) Was visionary experience an empowering capacity or a debilitating clinical symptom? Specifically, could Craddock’s mysticism be contained within one p…

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Mercy, Justice, and the Telephone Company

…bership, kinship or membership in other intermediate groups. You become an American by renouncing your ethnic identity, in other words, and by assimilating into American society, as defined by the political entity of the United States. Illegal immigrants are seen as refusing to participate in this national identity — they don’t “play by the rules,” they don’t speak the language, they take jobs from good hard-working Americans — and therefore they…

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