Religion Dispatches
…history of involvement in movements for social justice, and I meet growing numbers of American Jews who want to act as “Jewish global citizens” in pursuing justice around the world. As Pew notes, most American Jews are finding meaning as Jews outside of Jewish institutions. Therefore, we need to listen carefully to the innovative ways in which most Jews are experiencing Jewishness today. From the yearning I witness among American Jews to play a ro…
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…sh story of that “greatest generation.” What’s your next book? I have begun work on a Bronx, New York neighborhood that was created in the 1940s and housed Jews, Italians and Irish, but excluded African Americans. Today it is home to black Americans, Latinos and immigrants from many parts of the world. I will look at the story of its ethnic and racial transformation over 80 years….
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…how’s theology, or rather this season’s anti-theology, of the living dead. American Horror Story: Hotel has so far fooled most horror fans. Some feared that Lady Gaga would, in a very literal fashion, steal the show from us that’s become much beloved for its boundary-pushing, genre bending insanity. But, even that very meta-moment in which she portrays a century-old vampiress riding nearly nude into a 70s Studio 54-style club on a giant horse like…
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…t amounts to little more than “the power of positive thinking” or with any number of programs that bring people together for dialogue across political and religious divides. These problems don’t have convenient “spiritual” solutions. For a set of highly privileged Americans, I can understand why Worthen’s prescriptions might hold a certain attraction. But whatever one’s attitude to metaphysics and religion, it’s necessary to face the truth that Am…
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…expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony. He wrote an early primer on Native American language. That he anticipated American religious pluralism and freedom of religion in ways that seemed impossible in his era, even including ‘Turks,” Jews, native religion, and women preachers. He helped to found the Rhode Island colony, the first to give full religious liberty to its citizens, as a “shelter for persons distressed of conscience.” How do you think W…
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…Mohler, add that yoga’s popularization threatens the Christian essence of American culture. Hindu protesters, most notably the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), criticize yoga insiders for failing to recognize yoga’s so-called Hindu origins and illegitimately co-opting yoga for the sake of profit. I call this the Hindu origins position. The two are strikingly similar, most significantly insofar as they lean on the misconception that yoga is defini…
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…ive coalition of civil society and civil libertarian groups, including the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “…the CVE agenda adopts a particular approach to religion in which the latter is understood to “cause” political outcomes, both good and bad.” There has been less debate on the foreign policy side. According to the State Department’s Sarah B. Sewall, the increased US emphasis on…
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…said, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” The ADL is, then, endorsing a man who actively fantasized about ignoring a second Holocaust. Kissinger summed up his attitude to Jewish people by blandly and directly admitting his own prejudice. “If it were not for the accident…
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…opriation of “the soldier” and of soldiers’ voices in what some would call American civil religion or American religious nationalism. I think that approaching this topic from the perspectives of history and of religious studies has the potential to reveal a great deal about ties that bind and have bound soldiers and civilians and the nation, and why it is that those ties are so strong. This may seem like something of an outlier given my interest i…
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…y rightwing: one need look no further than Republican Senator Katie Britt’s recent rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address, during which she positioned Chinese communists and murderous illegal immigrants as existential threats to “innocent Americans” relying on God’s guidance to achieve their American dream. But the subtler, and perhaps more useful, aspect of Kenny’s work might lie in its ability to inspire readers to consider how…
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