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Sing the Glory of the Smoke: The Spiritual History of Jazz

By Andrew Aghapour

…musicians share with religion scholars certain anti-essentialist leanings. Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion Jason C. Bivins Oxford University Press (May 1, 2015) The similarities run deeper. Jazz musicians often describe their music as “sacred,” “spiritual,” and conducive of self-realization or social change. The history of jazz in America is one of cultural and sonic recombination, a mingling of traditions and concepts, words and soun…

This Year’s Best Books in African American Religion

By Jonathan L. Walton

…rning: this book should have come with a Parental Advisory sticker affixed! 1. Barbara Diane Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion, Belknap Press, November, 2008 Many have contested the uncritical use of the term “black church.” And others have even identified the religious, theological and political plurality that causes many contemporary scholars to feel guilty every time we employ this heuristic shorthand. But I ha…

Unauthorized Catholic Immigrants will Renew a Christian America, Archbishop Says

By Marie Friedmann Marquardt

…e a special duty today to be the guardians of the truth about the American spirit and our national identity.” In fact, Archbishop Gomez argues, immigrant Catholics “without proper documentation,” who share the values of “faith, family, and community” are “the key to American renewal.” Yes, Archbishop Gomez is arguing that unauthorized immigrants not only deserve the chance to adjust their status to live legally in the United States, but also hold…

Voodoo’s Quest for Respect

By Spencer Dew

…ikewise disturbing are two central practices: the sacrifice of animals and spirit possession. The former is bloody, the latter theatrical and sometimes violent, as dancing practitioners lapse into ritual trances and are “ridden” by loas from the Voodoo pantheon. Such acts strike many outsiders as “Satanic,” an inaccurate but nonetheless damaging label with which Voodoo is frequently plastered. Compounding the problem is Voodoo’s symbolism, promine…

Netflix’s Carlton Pearson Biopic, “Come Sunday,” Reveals Christianity’s Struggle for its Soul

By Peter Laarman

…Global South—the descendants of people who were “saved” through the work of 19th century European and North American missionaries—from the descendants of those very same missionaries who no longer find it possible to believe that God hates gays. It’s a drama that is literally tearing apart some of the world’s best-known international communions—Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans, even Roman Catholics. Come Sunday is at its most compelling when it sh…

‘Let It Be Unto Me’: Akin, Rape, and the Early Church

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…pretive chasm” separating two versions of the same story; the first told in 1752 and the second in 1836. A monk is told to keep watch over the body of a girl whose family believes has recently died, but instead forces himself upon her sexually. In the morning, it turns out that she is not dead, but was just in a coma. In due course it becomes clear that she is pregnant. In the 1752 version it is assumed that the monk must have known she was alive,…

Why it (Still) Makes Little Sense to Call ISIS Islamic

By Haroon Moghul

…gions. How did Muslims respond to abolition, which mostly took place in the 19thcentury—as it did here in the U.S.? Interestingly, Mattson cited two objections to abolition. Traditionalists were not against the idea of blanket manumission per se, but they either argued that the Shari’ah offered no mechanism to effect such a decision, or that “our slavery is not like American slavery”—a fascinating indication of the interconnectedness of the world—…

Who Benefits From Standardized Universal Time? And Other Questions to Ask As You Set Your Clocks Back This Weekend

By Michael Schulson

…spite the best efforts of business leaders and other reformers in the early 1900s, who wanted a year of 13 evenly spaced months, we still use the idiosyncratic Gregorian calendar, enacted by a 16th century Pope. “The global history of time reform shows how uneven, slow, and full of unintended consequences interconnectedness was,” writes Ogle. She may be overstating the case a bit: time reform was not a perfect, triumphal march for Universal Progre…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…

This Halloween, Think of Islam as a Religion of Pieces. Reese’s Pieces.

By Haroon Moghul

…ns infiltrating the West from within. Or show up on the evening of November 1st, also sans costume, and tell your surprised neighbors that you are Muslim Standard Time. Or reuse what you have in your closet. Come up the driveway in a burqa, abaya, gallabiya or shalwar qamis and, when confused homeowners ask, just say, “dressed as? No, I blew a tire and need some help.” Feign outrage as you pretend to put together the prejudice. You should at least…