Religion Dispatches
…ario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that takes i…
Read More…years, Ireland is no longer “the most Catholic country in the world.” The number of Irish who attend church every week has dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent. Kennedy spoke with a college professor who stopped going to church after the scandals broke; “when she cast her vote in favor of same-sex marriage, she says she was voting against the Catholic Church.” Kennedy also spoke with Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who she says “admits he’s…
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…, the eleven o’clock hour on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of American life. Despite all that’s occurred over the past 50 years in the culture more broadly, and all the Christian hand-wringing, American churches have remained largely segregated. And, while many have sought more benign explanations, others have spoken for quite some time, albeit in hushed voices, about the racial gatekeeping that persists in much of white Christian Ame…
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…ence in mind when writing? I wrote Spirit in the Dark both for scholars of American religion and for scholars of African American literature, as these are two of the academic fields in which I was trained. However, given the broader interest in black writers and literary movements (i.e. the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement), as well as in African American religion, I hope that the book finds a general academic audience (and perhaps even…
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…depict a black man as Jesus; and, finally, this is not the first piece of American art by a white individual that portrays an African American figure as God’s son. Depictions of Obama as a messianic figure are nothing new. Since his emergence at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama has become an icon of salvation. One statue had him in a robe, with a neon halo around his head; another had him riding a donkey just as Jesus had done f…
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…ress (May 29, 2015) In Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Stoll, a professor at Texas Tech University, explores the religious roots of environmentalist concepts of nature. Doing so, he challenges the preconception that conservationism and religion are inherently hostile towards each other. Stoll documents the role of Calvinism, Congregationalism, and Presbyterianism in the creation of our national parks,…
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…isiting Muslim counseling centers for specialized psychotherapy in greater numbers. Far from being an abstract term, intersectionality is necessary for the very survival of minority communities. Above all, though, it’s MASGD’s own community who must take priority, and that entails strengthening LGBT Muslims’ bonds with other progressive movements who seek justice and equality for all Americans. The group is fiscally sponsored by the National Queer…
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…there anything you had to leave out? I wanted to look more closely at Arab American civil rights activism in the 1980s and earlier. Fortunately, several excellent books (like Pamela E. Pennock’s The Rise of the Arab American Left) provide in-depth discussions of this history. I also devoted far too little attention to the relationships between primarily “immigrant Muslim” advocates and African-American and other “native Muslim” advocacy efforts. W…
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…precipitous decline—and the news that the religiously unaffiliated now outnumber Catholics—is perhaps only surprising to those who haven’t attended a Catholic church recently. Continue reading U.S. CHRISTIANITY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE U.S. CHRISTIANITY By Richard Flory In the cluster of comment on the recently released report on the changing American religious landscape from the Pew Research Center, we have seen two basic story lines: the U.S. is “l…
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…those religions, with the first Orthodox female rabbi recently hired by an American synagogue, but the Mormon excommunication of Kate Kelly, an advocate for opening the Mormon priesthood for women, unfortunately mirrors a familiar pattern for American Catholic advocates of women’s ordination. In the most high-profile case, peace activist Father Roy Bourgeois was dismissed by his religious order in 2012 for participating in the ordination of a Roma…
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