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‘Enchanted New York’ Offers a Journey Through the City’s Magical History — With Some Mystifying Oversights

By Gordon Haber

…logue of the city’s magical places and events, demonstrating that from the American Revolution to the Red Scare of the 1950s, “both witting and unwitting actors have engaged in magic, often with enormous historical consequences rippling out far beyond Manhattan’s shores.” The question arises, at least for me, of what Dann means by “magic.” He means “mind over matter,” that the “subtle always and everywhere rules over the dense” (his italics). Acco…

Hank Azaria Offers to Stop Doing Apu. So…Thank You?

By Murali Balaji

…by Hindus—or even the greater South Asian community —to protest Apu in the 1990s, and so he became an inextricable part of Simpsons iconography. For those of us living as Indian Americans (and Hindus) at the time of the show’s rise, “Ay Caramba” was only the second most memorable line next to “Thank You, Come Again,” which Azaria weaponized for mean-minded teens. Despite its presence in the country for nearly two centuries, as othered and exotici…

Trump’s Magical Appeal: A Dated Anthropologist Offers Clues

By Elijah Siegler

…parallels are eerie. Frazer’s Magic James Frazer’s career spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Durkheim, he was an armchair scholar, absorbing reports on “primitive” cultures from his European university offices to fashion grand theories about the world. Unlike Durkheim, who saw religion as exercising a generally positive function (and whose theories still have a lot of weight in the academy), Frazer, with his darker view of human…

‘Spooky Action’ of Quantum Physics Offers an Alternative Frame for War in the Middle East and the 2024 Election

By Peter Schwartz

…e of organized religiosity—a fascinating development, for sure. In the past 10 or 15 years, rates of unbelievers or those unaffiliated with any organized religion or any superimposing deity have more than doubled. But that’s not the irony. The irony—which also seems to be eluding most pundits—is that, despite the historically low percentage of people with religious conviction, the influence of religious conservatives may well be at an all-time hig…

Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?

By Eric Reitan

…summarizes Lewis’s argument just about every time he claims that morality offers a reason to believe in God, there is good reason to suppose that Collins intends to offer an argument along those lines, as opposed to the moral design argument that Bloom attributes to him. Theism Allows Us to See What Welsey Did in a Different Way But maybe Collins gets Lewis wrong and offers a moral design argument after all. If so, then Collins should not be view…

Mormon Church Finally Notes Black Elders, Still Offers No Apology

By Darron T. Smith

…d maintenance of racist discourse. Church leaders appear convinced that the 1978 official declaration, which ended 125 years of racial discrimination against black people (beginning with Brigham Young’s statement to the Utah Territorial Legislation in 1852) was enough to silence their critics. With a revelation and the stroke of a pen, white racist traditions ostensibly ceased to exist. Mitt Romney claimed he was overcome with emotion at the annou…

Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…uttmacher Institute. Thirty-five percent of Texas women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured, 13% higher than the national rate. Texas also has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than the national average, 88 pregnancies per 1,000 teen women, compared with 70 per 1,000 nationally. Yet in the face of this, the Texas legislature slashed family planning funding by two-thirds in 2011. The Republican-led legislature allocated another $8.4 million o…

“You’ve Never Met a Muslim”

By Hussein Rashid

…and, for ours, that was an impossibly beautiful Tuesday morning. September 11 put an end to the long 1990s when, as it is nearly inconceivable to imagine today, the biggest problem in our post-Communist, unipolar world seemed to be Monica Lewinsky. I had long planned to become a corporate lawyer. Two years later, I enrolled in law school only to leave within months. There were many reasons why, but among them was this: I could no longer go down t…

Trayvon Martin and American Exceptionalism

By Anthea Butler

…ut it does not surprise me. Violence is at the core of much of the African American experience. As a scholar, I know that black lives and bodies are cheap in the psyche of “white America.” If we aren’t dancing, catching a ball, or cleaning houses, we are “othered.” Even with the leader of the nation inhabiting his own skin, the blood of his African father and white mother are a constant reminder to whites that he is Other, and for many, inferior….

Policing Academic Freedom: A Book, a Controversy, and the Ominous Aftermath

By Michael Jerryson

…en non-Asian Asian states (sic). In an effort to combat the support of the American Academy of Religion, the Hindu American Foundation that had protested against Doniger’s work in 2009 published a blistering critique in the Huffington Post on the AAR. In a piece entitled “Academic Integrity: It’s What’s Missing at the AAR,” HAF co-founder and co-Director Suhag A. Shukla argues that Doniger’s book is part of an Orientalist project that privileges w…