Religion Dispatches
…ent last night in good spiritual company but it was almost two hours drive south to get there. Not being a night person, I got permission to stay over night in their retreat room. For people who let the hustle and bustle of city life get the best of them, I highly recommend such quarters: blissful darkness, with a gentle hooting owl in an otherwise silent night. But I was up and out this morning before the sunrise, because I have a full day ahead…
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…and historical forces—religious and secular, black and white, northern and southern, here and abroad. Some of these confluences have carved out deep channels of recognizable musical expression that have historically been talked about—whether implicitly or explicitly—in terms of race (black gospel, Southern gospel, white gospel convention singing, and so on). But gospel has always been more racially complex and culturally polyvocal than most narrat…
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…Howe) in his unsuccessful bid to be the Republican nominee for governor of South Dakota [See Mark Bergen’s earlier post here —Eds.]. According to his Web site, Howie is a realtor and “The Tea Party Republican” candidate for governor. His positions appear to be boilerplate hard-right conservative (guns, “pro-life,” “traditional values”), although if his mode of governing in any way resembles his dysfunctional Web site, the people of South Dakota wo…
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…r participated in a panel satirizing The View, and was feted by fellow panelist Star Parker for having 19 children because, as Parker proclaimed, “We win if we just keep having children, ’cause we’re going to outnumber them!”—a staple argument of the Quiverfull movement. Weeks earlier, Santorum had transformed this rhetoric into policy proposal at a South Carolina Fuddruckers appearance with the Duggars, where he argued that low birth rates and a…
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…ng of David Shulman’s book The Hungry God, and particularly a 12th century South Indian story that Shulman examines at length. One day, a Shiva-worshipper called Ciruttontar receives a visit from the god, who has disguised himself as a wandering ascetic. Eager to honor the holy man, Ciruttontar offers him a meal from any of his three herds. Shiva, in diguise, refuses. “The beast we eat is human,” he says—specifically healthy five year-old boys who…
Read More…As a whole, this exchange indicates that, for those of us who study modern South Asia and its diasporas, we still have a long way to go when it comes to effectively discussing how, after September 11, 2001 and rising to a fever pitch under the anti-immigration Trump administration, Brown South Asian bodies experience racism in ways that stand apart from the well-documented forms of systemic injustice that fall under the category of “Anti-Black” in…
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…As a whole, this exchange indicates that, for those of us who study modern South Asia and its diasporas, we still have a long way to go when it comes to effectively discussing how, after September 11, 2001 and rising to a fever pitch under the anti-immigration Trump administration, Brown South Asian bodies experience racism in ways that stand apart from the well-documented forms of systemic injustice that fall under the category of “Anti-Black” in…
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…on the American South, I looked at the white Southern Baptist Convention, Southern Presbyterians, and Southern Pentecostals, and found that their reaction to rock was almost uniformly negative and very often racialized. They attacked rock as “jungle music,” “congo rhythms,” and “savagery.” In some cases this is ironic because these are some of the very things that Pentecostals were criticized for themselves—for race mixing and having “debased” mu…
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…ights advocates to even make the simple point that Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian Americans should not face discrimination. Even as advocates have tirelessly worked to push back against Islamophobia, they have witnessed the constant expansion of deeply harmful anti-immigrant policies and practices, mainly through so-called national security programs. The laws and systems set up in the 1960s to protect communities from racism have not been nea…
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…m the trade unions and Socialist Party. The best anti-Communists were Socialists or former Socialists, because they hated Communism for ruining something they prized, and they knew how Communists subverted democratic organizations. They boasted that they were the experts on thwarting Communism. Niebuhr provided this group’s signature version of anti-communist ideology, an argument he developed in tandem with State Department guru George Kennan. Fa…
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