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#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

…ed.” 83% of members believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. American Baptist Churches USA (Mainline Protestant) Members (as of 2009): 1,310,505 In 1992, the American Baptist Churches USA General Board affirmed a one-sentence resolution on homosexuality: “American Baptist Resolution on Homosexuality”: “We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” In 2005, the board added the same language to…

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

By Josef Sorett

…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…

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

By Kaya Oakes

…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…

Islamophobia and Racism: Civil Rights at the Breaking Point

By Erik Love

…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…

Obama as Lord and Savior

By Edward J. Blum

…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…

How “Race Tests” Maintain Evangelical Segregation

By Joshua L. Lazard

…, 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…

“Dark” Skin No Longer a Curse in Online Book of Mormon

By Joanna Brooks

…sionary growth in Mexico, Central, and South America. Over the years, some American Indian and Latin American indigenous Mormons have actively claimed a “Lamanite” identity and positioned themselves as the direct heirs of the Book of Mormon. (I have heard Navajo LDS friends tell me that what they read in the Book of Mormon resembles stories they’ve heard from their grandparents.) Today, the Church’s greatest convert growth in the US is among Latin…

In Qur’an Burning We’re All Losers

By Julie Ingersoll

…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…

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

By Shaul Magid

…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…

I Want a Perfect Body

By Jeremy Biles

…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…