Religion Dispatches
…) by just two percentage points. But even before the Team Huck volunteers knew this, they had some theories about why their guy didn’t come in first. “Fox News skips him,” said Lynn Lewis, a Team Huck volunteer from Northern Virginia. After Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008, “McCain and Thompson kneecapped him [in South Carolina], claimed he wasn’t a fiscal conservative.” Then, Lewis maintained, when the candidates moved on to Florida, “Fox N…
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…as unremarkable—and largely unremarked upon. The Five Points, The Gangs of New York, and Low Life are good histories of the era. By contrast, today’s outcry against our murder rates shows a positive refinement of sensibility. It means that if this cultural shift continues, we might do something about it. There are, however, a few pieces of bad news. One is that in the outcry, silly things are said. “Prayer-shaming” is balderdash (as is the suggest…
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…the King Phillip’s War with the Wampanoag Indians, necessitating the construction of a new identity separate from that of their mother country. It’s around this time that men like Cotton Mather began to refer to white settlers as “Americans,” a designation which other colonial powers such as the Spanish and French, and indeed English settlers in the South, reserved exclusively for the Indians. For a long time there was an ambivalence about the Pu…
Read More…hat suggests a far higher per-capita rate of offending clergy than even in New Mexico. In New Mexico, the victims of abuse were mainly Nuevomexicano and Indigenous kids. The abusers were often, but not always, white. Many came to New Mexico from faraway places, but some were local men. Colonialism is a structure that has touched everybody and everything here. It has formed New Mexican Catholicism since the arrival of Spaniards in the 16th century,…
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…e superstitious. Now, for Immanuel, there’s no division between the spirit world and the visible world; same thing for Olukoya and many Pentecostals in African indigenous churches (AIC). Allen Anderson’s important ethnographical work on the “spirit-filled world” of sub-Saharan AICs, clearly shows their continuous-discontinuous relationship with African traditional beliefs and practices. For Anderson, Pentecostalism’s flexibility is what accounts f…
Read More…the King Phillip’s War with the Wampanoag Indians, necessitating the construction of a new identity separate from that of their mother country. It’s around this time that men like Cotton Mather began to refer to white settlers as “Americans,” a designation which other colonial powers such as the Spanish and French, and indeed English settlers in the South, reserved exclusively for the Indians. For a long time there was an ambivalence about the Pu…
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…the world and clump vastly different people and places together under the rubrics of the “Third World” and “developing countries.” The history of the “heathen world”—which I write about more in my forthcoming book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History—helps to explain how Americans can see such different regions of the world as capable of being grouped together under the same heading, while seeing their own nation as categorically diffe…
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…nleash Power), which took place in and around Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. In this controversial event (documented in the film, Stop the Church), a grassroots AIDS movement challenged the Catholic Church’s role in AIDS/HIV politics in the United States; in doing so, they challenged, as well, who “owned” the Church. As one organizer argues in the film (and here I paraphrase): “They are not the Church. We are the Church.” While a sing…
Read More…In an appearance on Morning Joe yesterday, Trump said the elimination of a New York Police Department program to spy on Muslims in the city’s mosques and other locations was a “mistake.” Trump claimed New York had “tremendous surveillance going on in and around the mosques of New York City and right now that has been totally cut out.” The NYPD spying program, which came to light when the Associated Press reported on it in 2011, was suspended in 20…
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…ction from harassment and abuse against women and LGBTI people in the real world exists in the online world too.” Colombia: Court gives final approval to marriage equality The Constitutional Court gave final approval to legal marriage equality on Thursday, April 28, after waiting for nearly five years for Congress to act on a 2011 ruling that said couples had the right to ask judges and notaries to solemnize their relationships. From Human Rights…
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