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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…

Secure Borders? Not a Chance, Senator

By Ira Chernus

…other side of this paradox, and the emphasis can change over time. Recent American history illustrates that point very well, as another scholar of American religions, Robert Wuthnow, demonstrates in After Heaven, a book that offers a unique, if indirect, insight into the current debate on immigration reform. Wuthnow first set out to understand the distinctive spiritual style of the 1950s. Reading the religious literature of that era and interview…

Heaven is All-American

By Mary Valle

…art, landlocked. What about the rest of us?, I wonder. But even being “All-American” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anymore (if it ever was.) Such is the discontent of Pastor Burpo. When Colton begins to burble about things he saw in heaven while on the operating table, Todd gets rather agitated. Everyone else seems to not care or shrugs off Colton’s fancies as being a product of the potent combination of a 4-year-old’s sense of unreality combine…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ere’s a reason for the phrase, ‘It’s darkest before the dawn.’ So often in American history the greatest movements toward social justice and greater democracy and new religious institutions only happened in the wake of the very dark chapters in history that preceded them. In American history you get, at the very same time, the unfolding of the progressive movement and the strongest expression of the Ku Klux Klan at the beginning of the 20th centur…

Bobby Jindal Hypes His Christian Cred at Liberty U.

By Murali Balaji

…ten embarrassed to identify as a Hindu. I just wanted to be accepted as an American, because in this country, the dominant narrative has been—and continues to be—that being American implicitly (or explicitly) means being Christian. It’s likely why Barack Hussein Obama has had to repeatedly reaffirm his Christian bona fides. For Hindu kids, the dilemma of having to explain a “funny religion” can be traumatic, and the bullying that takes place—often…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…e fairy-tale story of irreversible progress in LGBT rights is a very white American story. Americans of color have long known that progress is not linear. LGBT people from countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, among others, can tell you what it feels like when attitudes make a U-turn. The laws in these countries are benign, compared to the many places in the world where homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment or even death, but tha…

Keepers of History or Dangerous Idols: The Case Against Statues From an Unlikely Source

By David Zvi Kalman

…eliminate the idea of America. The tie between memory and statuary is more American than Americans realize. Given that many Americans don’t know that the Civil War happened after the War of Independence, and that the president this week misidentified a sculpture while defending its importance to memory, it’s questionable whether our memorializing strategies have been all that successful in the first place. Given this dubious track record, we would…

Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…e the country in Christian terms—in this instance, to enforce the norms of American literary, sexual, and religious expression? 2) Would women—in this case, ambitiously learned ones like Craddock—be able to claim academic standing, spiritual authority, and social equality in American public life? 3) Was visionary experience an empowering capacity or a debilitating clinical symptom? Specifically, could Craddock’s mysticism be contained within one p…

Mercy, Justice, and the Telephone Company

By Daniel Schultz

…bership, kinship or membership in other intermediate groups. You become an American by renouncing your ethnic identity, in other words, and by assimilating into American society, as defined by the political entity of the United States. Illegal immigrants are seen as refusing to participate in this national identity — they don’t “play by the rules,” they don’t speak the language, they take jobs from good hard-working Americans — and therefore they…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…together, chasing after money and the chance to strike it big—again, think American Wild West, for better and worse—you get… things that surprise you. Or, at the least, things you do not expect. • • • • • • • • ⬆ Before praying, Muslims perform a ritual ablution known as wudu’, which includes washing your feet. In many Western countries, this means the awkward moment when your colleagues find you barely balanced on one leg with your opposite fo…