Religion Dispatches
…think they’ve found a clever way to bring the Commandments in through the back door by invoking a “free speech zone.” They have to understand what that means—free speech means free speech for everyone. Those courthouse plazas may get awfully crowded….
Read More
…days, the ways in which we can measure the extremities of human experience between the lushness, the decadence, the celebration of Tuesday and the death of Wednesday. “Eat drink and be merry,” somebody once wrote. From the medieval celebrations of Mardi Gras came one of the most useful critical terms in our cultural vocabulary—the carnivalesque. That term is most associated with the twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin who, in…
Read More…a dormitory and besides going to class and a small part time job, I was a free bird. In Ramadan a free bird, flies high on the rituals of the month. I stood for 20 units or tarawih every night that I was fasting. Like the first time reading through the Qu’ran in Arabic on my own this was exhilarating. Somewhere around 12 or 14 units, I lost track of everything outside of the recitation and the ritual performance—the zone. It was even more intense…
Read More
…t fail, or are overturned by courts, there has been a concerted attempt to use bogeymen (such as minorities committing voter fraud or Muslim terrorists) to justify certain actions. These are often promoted under the premise of upholding American values, when in reality they maliciously target the concept of equal citizenship in a democracy. What Trump has done is bring out into the open what had previously been done behind the scenes, or with litt…
Read More…Mohler and McConnell are probably just trying to box Grimes in. If she refuses to accede to Mohler’s constrictive “invitation” she will likely be accused of ignoring and insulting Kentucky’s “evangelical Christians.” If she should consent to Mohler’s terms she could fairly expect to be maligned as an enemy of “evangelical values.” Damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. It is unlikely that Mohler or McConnell ever entertained the illusion t…
Read More
…dence are not uniformly distributed. In the context of digital monopolies, users become locked into a limited range of commercial providers who, in turn, generate profit by extracting user data—the lifeblood of the digital economy—and packaging it for sale to marketers, government agencies, and banks. Such techniques entrench social stereotypes and exacerbate class inequality even as profits boom. To be clear: my critique here is directed not at F…
Read More
…ant the state out of the way of private enterprise, they want the state to use public resources to actively promote a form of Hindu yoga. United by anxiety about immigration—and especially Muslims—as well as perceived threats to capitalist and patriarchal forms of domination, Trump and his allies among Hindus in the U.S. and India propagate militant forms of nationalism all while marketing themselves as protectors of social values. Trump and his a…
Read More
…claration that it respects the “foundational constitutional protection for free speech and association.” Indeed, the history of surveillance in the United States beginning with the establishment of the FBI in 1908 is the chronicle of infringing upon civil liberties and freedom of speech in order to target individuals and communities deemed to be politically subversive, including (perceived) communists, civil rights leaders, and communities of colo…
Read More
…a “creative” version of nostalgia, she perpetuated a scenario where sexual freedom and women’s equality was the death knell to America. She wrote of the importance of women in raising “manly men,” where there was no “blurring of the sexes,” and “a man’s word was law in his house, no matter how shrewish his wife,” as she wrote in her 1967 article, “Love Thy Neighbor An Example of Divine Humor.” In her words “Papa had nights out with the Boys, and i…
Read More…n exemption from generally applicable laws that everyone else has to comply with, exemptions that are not envisioned or required by settled law on the Free Exercise Clause. “The state is making itself into a church.”=Um, what?…
Read More