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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

…w tweaks, Buddhist practices of mindfulness meditation fit right into this American tradition. Since the 1970s, Americans have used quiet, awareness-based contemplative practices to calm and focus their minds. Much of this is thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course. Kabat-Zinn studied mindfulness meditation under the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, but he has emphasized the psychological a…

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AFA: Native Americans Lost their Land for Not Being Christians

…cture which in turn justifies and makes sense of the otherwise nonsensical American proposition. It all comes down to this: the American story that Fischer so vigorously defends never happened. That he continues to spout this stuff has less to do with God than with his need to stay on top of the heap. With the minority population continuing to surge in the US, look for voices like Fischer’s to get ever shriller—and ever less relevant to the beauti…

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With Christian Schools At Risk In Israel, Crickets from American Christian Conservatives

…situation “a ‘death sentence’ for Christian schools in Israel.” Given the American Christian right’s interest in religious freedom, particularly for Christians, and particularly in the Middle East, where Christians are enduring and fleeing persecution, one might expect a massive outcry over this. Just imagine the objections to unequal treatment, by any government, of any Christian organization. But when I reached out to three major conservative C…

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Poets and Preachers: How Black Literature Blurs the Lines Between Sacred and Secular

…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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The Children of Bellow and Roth: New Book of Short Fiction Takes On the Male Jewish Experience

…ely a theme in a lot of stories. That’s something that’s particular to the American Jewish experience for you? I don’t know if it’s American, but maybe it is, in terms of, I think, my expectations for [how] Jewish people behave. My experience of America is fairly limited. I know New York and I know L.A. I wouldn’t be able to discuss what the Jewish community in Nebraska feels like. But in my experience I’ve found we’re much more comfortable in our…

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Female Deacons: Pope Francis Walks It Back, Women Clergy Weigh In

…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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The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

…intellectual history. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism Mark Stoll Oxford University Press (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 towar…

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Indonesian Clerics Issue Anti-Gay Fatwa; Anti-Civil Union Peruvian Lawmaker Cites Hitler; Is Christianity more ‘un-African’ than Homosexuality?; Global LGBT Recap

…raised more than $376m worldwide. The Guardian story reviews the influence American conservative evangelicals and groups like the American Center for Law and Justice s on anti-gay legislation in Uganda and elsewhere. Africa is by and large conservative, and many poor countries are susceptible to charity with a socially conservative agenda. It’s within this context that many US evangelical churches go to Africa to win the battles that are being los…

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Refusing Religion, Claiming the Future: A Roundtable Discussion on “The Nones Are Alright”

…after the millennials suggest high levels of religiosity as well). African Americans in general, and African-American women in particular, are among the most religious groups in the nation. So, even though black youth may be expressing their dissatisfaction with the orthodoxies and dysfunction of the black church, they are not, by and large, abandoning these traditions wholesale. This has a lot to do with the role the black church—for good or for

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Trump’s Fear and Loathing Won’t Silence The Nation’s Sole LGBT Muslim Organization

…ly in the current political atmosphere, I interviewed four pioneers of the American LGBT Muslim movement: Faisal Alam, Urooj Arshad, Raquel E. Saraswati, and Tynan Power. These leaders are members of MASGD’s Steering Committee, and were gracious enough to discuss with me their apprehensions, hopes, and concrete efforts as activists encountering popular suspicion, state-sanctioned persecution, and prejudiced legislation on a new scale. *** As an Am…

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