Religion Dispatches
…godliness. The idea that “fit bodies… signify fitter souls” permeates the American consciousness with anxiety about the body while shaping beliefs about beauty. Today, as Zed Nelson wants to show in his work, the forces of globalization have propelled the American conception of the perfect body into the world at large, where it has merged with and inflected traditional Western ideals of beauty. Nelson writes, “The promise of bodily improvement is…
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…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…
Read More…Hindu” by Prema Kurien. Yet the aftermath of 9/11 has made the process of Americanization different for American Muslims. What, months ago, Sarah called the utter ordinariness of demeaning Islam has turned into full-blown, ugly bigotry (and that includes both Qur’an burnings as well as efforts around the country to prohibit the building of mosques). Today my friend and colleague Parvez Ahmed, who has, himself, been attacked by anti-Muslim activis…
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…to participate in interviews, and I had a much harder time getting Muslim American men. I found that there’s a lot of self-surveillance. American Muslims are surveilled by the state. They’re surveilled by private citizens. Then they participate in self-surveillance as well. When you’re hyper-surveilled you monitor what you say and do to avoid bringing suspicion onto your body. When you’re on a state list that’s very disempowering. When I got men…
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Sharon Slater, American anti-gay activist and president of Family Watch International, recently encouraged delegates attending a law conference in Lagos, Nigeria to resist the United Nations’ calls to decriminalize homosexuality. Keynoting the Nigerian Bar Association Conference, Slater told delegates that they would lose their religious and parental rights if they supported “fictitious sexual rights.” One such “fictitious right” is the right to…
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…m the popular narrative. King’s legacy has been appropriated in service to American exceptionalism and Christian supremacy. In essence, to be a real Christian and real American is to be like the mythic King. In the years after King’s assassination, his opponents (and some allies) were relegated to the category of the “scribes and Pharisees.” Useful props to deploy to demonstrate the superiority of King’s approach of nonviolent resistance and integ…
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…rtant to keep in mind that this conversation is unfolding within a divided American Buddhist community. Specific numbers are hard to pin down, and estimates vary widely, but roughly three-quarters of American Buddhists are Asian. The remainder are predominantly white converts. Practitioners in the Asian diaspora typically join communities that are aligned with sects popular in their origin countries. Convert Buddhists, on the other hand, tend to c…
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…of government via policies that would drastically change the landscape of American governance and, as the document says, “bend or break the bureaucracy to the President’s will.” Calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, Project 2025 would roll back (if not eliminate) civil rights protections for LGBTQ students in publicly funded schools. While the language may be different, this massive shift away from federal regulation aligns…
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…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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…t trafficked in well-meaning revisionist history can tell us nothing about American Jewish culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the story of how “Oyfn Pripetshik” came to be sung in Walnut Grove may tell us something about the enduring place of Jewish languages in American culture today. “The Craftsman” was the first television job for a young writer named Paul Wolff, now a professor of screenwriting at the University of Sout…
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