Religion Dispatches
…eep South Center connection was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assi…
Read More
…and Uganda. Critics accused Engle’s event of being the next in a series of American evangelical efforts to persecute homosexuals in Uganda and feared that Sunday’s gathering would help rally attendees behind the proposed legislation. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, introduced last October by parliamentarian David Bahati, had its origins in a March 2009 visit by three anti-gay American evangelists—Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, and Don Sch…
Read More…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…
Read More
…e of duty for the first time in 33 years. Three others perish with him. An American consulate is destroyed. At the same time, an American flag is torched, while another diplomatic post, an embassy, is stormed in a neighboring Arab Muslim country. Days later, further outbursts against American officials and diplomatic sites occur in two other Arab Muslim countries. The headlines are here stripped of their local names, not to protect the innocent bu…
Read More
…terror.” Terror may be a hyperbolic way of describing what’s happening to American Buddhism, but the message it receives from science and capital are threatening enough. Corporate rationalism says to Buddhism, “If you want to exist and thrive in this culture, you will need our money and you will need to acknowledge our scientific worldview.” And how the Science Buddha has grown, thanks in large part to the support of Google’s Search Inside Yourse…
Read More…t is the principle of the thing with George, and, moreover, being a native American and a veteran of the last war, he has a rather narrow prejudice against being ordered around by guys who talk like they just got off the boat.” Spelvin’s borough of bubbleheads sounds more like Brooklyn than Mayberry. His anxieties, his bigotries—organized labor, immigrants—are those most commonly attendant to urban living. Even his name is a sly joke for working c…
Read More
…ements like Black Lives Matter have surely played a part in allowing young American Muslims to make common cause with LGBT Americans in the fight against white supremacy, neoliberalism, imperialism, and hatred toward those who are different. The good news? Unless young socially conservative American Muslims come up with original arguments for the immorality of same-sex relationships, we should expect greater affinity between these marginalized min…
Read More
…er of the community. Ahmadis consider themselves fully Muslim, and to most American eyes they would be indistinguishable from any other Muslim denomination. But this self-understanding is highly contested within Islam. They have been described as the “Quakers of Islam” because of their commitment to pacifism, social equality, and democratic self-governance. They have also been frequent targets of violence and persecution, particularly in their hom…
Read More
…bel, it turns out, was responsible for ousting Hargis from the Tulsa-based American Christian College (founded to teach “anti-communist patriotic Americanism”) after Hargis was embroiled in a sex scandal; Hargis was accused of having sex with four male and one female students; the woman, it turned out, married one of the men in a ceremony officiated by Hargis, and the couple found out on their honeymoon that he had had sex with both of them. But i…
Read More
…and I’m gonna tell you the future. It’s an American story, and that’s why Americans are gonna love it. People are going to build you up, and, God, are they going to, because when you’re great and new, we love you. Man, we’ll build you up into something that doesn’t even exist. You’re going to change the world. But you know what? Once they’ve built you as high as they possibly can, they’re gonna tear you back down—it’s the most predictable pattern…
Read More