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Evangelical Islamophobia as American as Apple Pie

By Shalom Goldman

…etations.” Islam-bashing in the run-up to the elections and the increasing number of attacks on American mosques needs to be understood against this broad historical background. But, as noted earlier, the fear-mongering during the election cycle was not uniformly successful. House of Representatives member, Keith Ellison, for example, kept his Minnesota seat despite the anti-Muslim invectives he endured. And not only did he win, Rep. Ellison, a co…

New World A-Coming: How Black Religion Helped Shape Racial Identity

By Judith Weisenfeld

…e students in mind, particularly those I have taught in courses on African American religious history and religion and race in America. I wanted to engage them with a readable text that offers new theoretical insights about the co-constitution of race and religion in this period and that locates these religious groups, that highlight religious diversity, in a prominent place in the narrative of African American religious history. Are you hoping to…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…. Goldman, American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege (New York: New York University Press, 2012) and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Esalen Institute, a retreat center formed in 1962 near Big Sur, California, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized prac…

Breaking Up With Marilynne Robinson Over Her Refusal to Acknowledge the Dark Side of Puritanism

By Peter Laarman

…apartheid South Africa, where a notoriously brutal regime that, just like New England, saw itself as a “New Israel,” survived until 1990. This is the darker side of Calvinism that Robinson has seldom if ever discussed, and it would really help her case for Calvinist “liberality” if she could also acknowledge the shadow side. For example, she might consider asking the Irish what they think of Oliver Cromwell’s Christian charity. To my mind it’s Mi…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…e requires some creativity and thoughtfulness; marking the appearance of a new decade, or a new century, proves to be far more challenging than remembering to change the year on the checks and Thank You notes I write in January. This time around, there’s no escaping the fact that our collective feet are now planted firmly in the twenty-first century. And it is worth reflecting on what this dawning perspective (of seeing ourselves as twenty-first…

Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads

By Deborah Jian Lee

…pay for it.” The audience roared with laughter, but “Jan,”* who is Korean American, and her Mexican-American husband, ushered their children out of the service. Jan asked her pastor for a public apology. When he shrugged off her request, she was shocked. He had been a spiritual guide for years. He officiated the funeral of her son. But now it was as if they didn’t know each other. She resigned from her role in the children’s ministry, and her fam…

American Jews: From Holocaust to New Age Hasidism?

By Martin Kavka

…aism, on a sociological note. Given the rate of intermarriage among Jewish Americans and the ways in which American culture no longer is content with prescripted roles for varying ethnic groups, Magid infers that American Jews now live in a postethnic culture. The ways in which Jews perform their particularism vary widely. In one way or another, all Jewish Americans today are Jews by choice, defining their identity as opposed to accepting others’…

Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

By Katherine Stewart

…e large-scale organizations that successfully planted churches in multiple numbers of New York City’s public schools, and the numbers grew quickly. During the 2010-2011 school year, the Department of Education said 160 congregations were granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to th…

The Best Books Media of 2008

By Jeff Sharlet

…North Carolina)—but don’t let it dissuade you from reading Anthea Butler’s new book. Butler writes about lower class African-American Pentecostal women, a sadly understudied group. Focusing on the experience of sanctification, and the concomitant “dedication to both spiritual practices and temporal obedience,” Butler looks at how belief shaped these women’s understanding of self, community, and God, enabling them to “negotiate for and obtain power…

Will the Religious Side with Workers?

By Peter Laarman

…s do more than anyone else to offer protection and a better way of life to new Americans. But even if theologically moderate Protestants begin to swing more toward a pro-union stance, what about other religious groups? Will younger members of the contemporary Jewish community who “live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans” (in Milton Himmelfarb’s still-apt phrase) abandon American Jews’ traditional allegiance to trade unionism? Will incr…