Religion Dispatches
…to the west to predominantly white communities, even the so-called working class ones, and it’s a radically different story. In the book I highlight how de facto segregation has become more intractable now—such that, according to the US2010 project, upper middle class African American and Latino homeowners actually live in poorer neighborhoods than do low-income white people. That cold reality belies bromides about post-racialism, colorblindness…
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…helmingly South Asian, especially in Dubai—they form the service and labor class, but many South Asians are wealthy professionals and businesspersons. Dubai and the UAE have historically been more a part of the Indian Ocean economy than the Arab world, which is barely a coherent economic concept (countries like Turkey belong as much to Eastern Europe as the Middle East; the Gulf more to India and East Asia than to Arab and Berber North Africa). O…
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…University and I fell in love with teaching. Suffolk was an iconic working-class university—in the 1960s that meant working-class first-generation-college white immigrant families. I had young men negotiating grades with me because if they didn’t get a C, they’d get drafted. I investigated how people avoided the draft and became very aware of class divisions in Boston and America at large. The war really turned me into a social critic, a thinker,…
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…is dream of deliverance, this longing for the overthrow of a predatory overclass, was deep and broad enough to unite labor radicals like Hillman and upper middle class reformers like Jane Addams. It was a dream heartily embraced by a significant cohort of “Social Gospel” leaders (e.g., Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and George D. Herron) who were appalled by what they regarded as the blasphemous identification of most other church leade…
Read More…because it was the last of 44 rules the commission proposed for conference business. General Conference delegates approved the first 43 rules, after their own ups and downs, late on May 10. Thus, an arcane procedural debate became, for many United Methodists, mainly about long-simmering differences regarding ministry with gay and lesbian individuals. A new rule aimed at fostering trust among church decision-makers ended up facing considerable dist…
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…lled for protesting taxes that oppressed working-class fishermen and small businesses like Jesus’s “family business,” carpentry. These taxes supposedly bankrolled the luxurious lifestyles of the Roman emperors and Jewish ruling class—a culture the authors reduce to wanton violence and sexual licentiousness (i.e., homosexuality). This fake history relies on superimposed class, geographical, and racial dichotomies. Jesus and his bootstrapping discip…
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…, and environmental regulation to a minimum? Ensuring white power ensures corporate power. There’s no mischaracterization. 6. Back to the path forward for progressives. Nobody I know who is serious about racial justice ignores for one minute the role of class. Sadly, the paladins of waging class struggle often won’t reciprocate and acknowledge the role of race. And until they do, the idea of a winning class struggle will remain what it’s always be…
Read More…tyle things into place, as we all know, are good for us anyway. Before the class was over, we had to make an “action plan” for the next week: something we would do between this class and the next weigh-in the following week. We broke into groups of two and were supposed to make sure that our partners were specific: when, how much, how many, and what ever we chose. I had the guy who had lost 6 pounds by eating lunch and that was his goal again for…
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…world. The reality of the matter is that what we see in religious studies classes across the United States is the great variety of manners in which religions happen in and through their rituals and practices, through their symbolic and communal exchanges, and, yes, in light of and sometimes in spite of their in-the-head beliefs. Two of the more usefully analytic definitions of religion that I offer my students, which is not to say they are the “r…
Read More…making demands that are not required of heterosexual couples. Kyrgyzstan: United Nations Human Rights Officials Urge Against Anti-Gay Bill The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has urged the government of Kyrgyzstan not to adopt the anti-gay law that has moved through the parliament. The experts include the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom or opinion and expression, David Kay…
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