Religion Dispatches
…or Ms. in English—Hajjah Naimah or Hajji Umar, for example. It can also be used alone, the way we say sir or ma’am. Occasionally it is used for an older person to show respect even if the person has not actually made the pilgrimage. But mostly, it is about a status. I think about this now, since I have actually waited almost 30 years since I tried to go the first time. If I had gone then, I would surely be less anxious to do it again at this age….
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…religious thinking and rational thinking. Throughout the book McWhorter’s use of religion only serves one purpose: it’s shorthand for backwards, closed-minded, illogical and irrational thinking. But it also betrays McWhorter’s own messiah complex in relation to Black people. To make this point, McWhorter invokes the well-worn trope of Jewish legalism when he states: “The Elect are our Pharisees. In fostering antiracist ideas that actually harm bl…
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…verage of religion”? Miller writes, “Certain journalists” (no names here), use ‘dominionist’ the way some folks on Fox News use the word ‘sharia.’ Its strangeness scares people. Without history or context, the word creates a siege mentality in which ‘we’ need to guard against ‘them.’ Really? There is an extraordinary propaganda campaign built around convincing Americans that sharia law and Muslims generally pose a dire threat to the Constitution….
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…condition that they be exiled beyond the Mississippi River; they could be freed but denied civil and political rights; or they could be freed and given the same rights as white people despite the ways in which slavery had “depraved their faculties.” The primary problem usually cited in regard to the third option was the one that John Adams raised in critiquing Tucker’s entire emancipation scheme: “Justice to the negroes would require that they sh…
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…next man. Nice. But I hope you noticed I said man to men, and I don’t ever use the word unless explicitly male. I never use that word for human being, person, or humanity as whole. That gives people too much license whether to include women as persons or human beings, so I just don’t do it. But here it is intentional. Well, I think about the idea of hajj as a visit before the king. Men, who are basically used to certain predominance in society, if…
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…Resources.” Over at AlterNet, Bruce Wilson writes that Gothard wanted to use Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony’s seminal Institutes of Biblical Law for his programs if it weren’t for their disagreement over divorce. In his post, Wilson focuses too much on the issue of the capital offenses for which some Reconstructionists advocate stoning. That emphasis favors sensationalism over more pressing issues in our political culture — like the…
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…practicing what we preach.” And that, apparently, includes not just opposition to abortion, but a conservative claim that “big government” infringes on religious liberty: “How can we train our college students to advocate for limited government and personal freedom—especially religious freedom—if we don’t fight this unparalleled attack on those very principles?” In short, don’t be surprised if the “religious freedom” argument finds its way into c…
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…didn’t know those terms. Yet scholars seem to be more rigid about similar uses of language related to sex. I would also make use of recent literature on aspiring saints and feigned sanctity, clarifying what seems to be less than obvious, that religion and sexuality are not either/or categories, but both/and. I have seen your book in quite surprising places: in women’s bookstores and big chain stores, on syllabi in religious studies, history, and…
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…stified by the myth of the black, male rapist. Most lynchings occurred because black men were accused of raping white women. Wells’ investigation into hundreds of lynching cases determined that most of the time when authorities discovered black men and white women having sex, it was consensual. In short, she exposed that white women not only sought to have sexual relations outside of marriage, they sometimes did so with African-American men. Wells…
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…aving this terrible sin of slavery at its beginning, then getting a little better with Jim Crow and a little better with civil rights. It’s too easy to say, “No, things aren’t perfect, but we’ve come a long way.” We cannot dismantle what we have not named. The truth is that black people in North Carolina had more political power in 1868 than they did in 1968. We had more political power after the Voting Rights Act in 1965 than we do today after Sh…
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