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The Myth of ‘Voodoo’: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti

…gies, philosophies, languages, medical therapies, diets, rites of passage, codes of conduct, aesthetic norms, artistic conventions, and technologies furnish entire communities with a shared sense of identity and the ritual/theological grammars required to guide their common life and transmission of humanity from one generation to the next. If God’s good nature is reflected in the slave trade, what was the Devil up to? American ignorance of Vodou b…

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Modern Vampires: Your Neighbors and Spouses

…(Praeger, release date: May 30, 2009). What inspired you to write Vampires Today? What sparked your interest? Some people think I study vampires simply because they are unusual. I’ve even been asked if I am a vampire myself. The reality is that I became interested in the vampire community when I learned of a massive survey being conducted by the Atlanta Vampire Alliance (AVA). Their project was relevant to the sociology of knowledge: instead of de…

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The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

…us Supreme Court called the restauranteur’s defense “patently frivolous.”) Today, there is a similar but not identical logic in some of the controversies on which I have previously reported, especially those of the baker who wouldn’t create a custom cake for a gay wedding and the foster care agency that refused to place children with a lesbian couple. The challenge today is how to distinguish between, on the one hand, attempts to license discrimin…

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A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

…ions are better than in Saudi Arabia.” He points to the status of women in today’s Iran. More than 60% of university students are women. And, unlike in Saudi Arabia, women in Iran drive. Kadivar delights in telling me that in the holy city of Qom, there are women cab drivers who specialize in taking families on excursions. But most of our conversation was about the murder of Rafiq Tagi. In an open letter to Ayatollah Lankarani, son of the author o…

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A Catholic’s Eulogy for the Harvard “Black Mass” Controversy

…of anti-Semitism and white supremacy, no matter where you are in the world today). Unlike these symbols that are based in reality, however, a thoughtful investigation into the “black mass” would have revealed that this is actually a symbol in search of a reality. Boston University professor David Frankfurter, in his award-winning 2006 book Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, argues that, when we apply the mos…

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The Sanders Insurgency: A Return to the “Secular Sacred”?

…–the sole concerns of the kind of business unionism that is most prevalent today. They demanded total social transformation, equating “wage slavery” with degradation and a horrible affront to democracy itself. If we can easily see from our perspective how white racism and nativism tainted and fatally handicapped their insurgency, we should also remember how resentment and suspicion of “the other” were consciously and continuously stoked by the so-…

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When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

…o little? What is really counseling against reform? Another major story in today’s news cycle offers a chilling answer to this question. And it is not the “rugged individualism” that Roosevelt so perfectly embodied, and that President Obama acknowledged appreciatively in his speech. Not at all. Care and compassion have ever been the flip-side of the long American experiment in self-reliance. No, the simple answer is unapologetic and state-sponsore…

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Facing White Christianity’s Role in the January 6th Insurrection

…lgamation of white supremacy and American Christianity that lives among us today. These unsettling connections among white supremacy, white Christianity and support for the former president are not confined to the extremists who attacked the Capitol. There is a strong correlation between voting for Trump in the 2020 election and median scores on the Racism Index—a composite measure of attitudes about systemic racism I developed in my recent book,…

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The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

…eeklies’ born-again fondness for religious authority has not endured until today. Since the explosion of the clergy sex abuse scandals in the media, a curious trend has emerged on the covers of news magazine. In four Time covers—April 1, 2002, November 27, 2006, June 7, 2010, February 25, 2013—the familiar figure of the pope appears, but altered. Unlike the scores of previous covers featuring the Bishop of Rome, the pope now stands either with his…

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A Scholar Responds: Scripture as a Weapon

…ertainly would have been appalled by the size and scale of the US military today, with its extensive and continually growing branches. And that great octopus, the Pentagon, would have represented everything they despised about Britain and her aggressive imperial reach. That is why the Constitution is maddeningly vague about whether and how we should have a standing military at all. Article 1, Section 8 clearly lays responsibility for all military…

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