Religion Dispatches
…a culture, have to stop infantilizing and deifying rural and white working-class Americans. Their experience is not more of a real American experience than anyone else’s, but when we say that it is, we give people a pass from seeing and understanding more of their country. We must all understand that America is a melting pot and that none of us has a more authentic American experience. I’m all for soul-searching in the wake of the coalition of eva…
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…tual-but-not-religious sensibility that pervades the North American middle class, and they do so with a mostly appreciative attitude. From Shrinking Churches to ‘Cultural Victory’ Intellectual historian David Hollinger has spent the past decade writing about the overlooked social, cultural, and political achievements of liberal Protestantism, now collected in After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History. In Embatt…
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…f the state; though many of them feel that their citizenship is not “first class” but rather “second or third class.” Among “Israeli Arabs” (itself a contested and contentious term), there is a high degree of identification with the Palestinian Arabs of The West Bank and Gaza. Recent Arab-Jewish riots in the coastal city of Acco (Acre) have exacerbated Arab-Jewish tensions within the country as a whole. For these reasons, officials were relieved w…
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…America”—the America Michael Harrington saw. He speaks only of the middle class. I call this “middle class astigmatism,” which distorts the moral vision and certainly the rhetoric of American politicians. The King-Obama symbolism and symmetry can only take us so far. We can only hope and pray that Obama’s administration will be better than the evidence suggests. Let me take that back: rather than hoping and praying—or in addition to doing so—we s…
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…eryone spineless wimps who stand for nothing except vague and gooey middle-class niceness. —Clueless 19th-century rationalist holdovers who still believe it’s possible to look at things objectively because, I don’t know, our schooling was so full of Moustache Grooming 101, practicums in The Care of Tweed Frock Coats, and private lessons in Somber Intonation that we simply never got around to critiques of modernity, or something. Pretty impressive,…
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…ned with detention if I didn’t sing gospel songs in my public school music class; and a teacher once asked whether the “chilled monkey brains” scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom accurately reflected Hindu practice. My family didn’t have many friends in the community, so I was an outsider, and often embarrassed to identify as a Hindu. I just wanted to be accepted as an American, because in this country, the dominant narrative has been—…
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…visible here as well where the rioters were older and from a higher social class than most right-wing terrorists have been to date, according to a survey conducted by the Atlantic. The men and women who stormed the Capitol had well-paying jobs, were middle-aged—and a concerning number were former members of the military and law enforcement. Many things about the attempted coup in Germany remain unknown, “especially regarding the groups’ specific p…
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…aching the course in 1983, I’ve always had a gay person come in and give a class on same-sex relationships. There are no more or less gays today than there were then, but they were much more closeted then,” Parrella recalled. “Now students raise their hands and come out during that class session.” Of course, Santa Clara may be an exception to what is typically a stricter rule. The Bishop of San Jose, Patrick McGrath, puts effort into maintaining a…
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…th as a wedge. Often, its premise seems to be that people of the same age, class, education, nationality, and political orientation have serious cause to dislike each other. When instead they get along, that harmony is fodder for a distinctive kind of civic schmaltz—the earnest celebration of something that was never especially surprising to begin with. In the first page of Interfaith Leadership, Patel writes that “my own position as a Chicago-bas…
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…. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an “upper-middle-class Catholic Disneyland” and need to be shaken up. “I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an instigator, but—” he says, trailing off…
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