Search for "American Airlines 1800-299-7264 New Reservation Number"

Islamophobia and Racism: Civil Rights at the Breaking Point

By Erik Love

…there anything you had to leave out? I wanted to look more closely at Arab American civil rights activism in the 1980s and earlier. Fortunately, several excellent books (like Pamela E. Pennock’s The Rise of the Arab American Left) provide in-depth discussions of this history. I also devoted far too little attention to the relationships between primarily “immigrant Muslim” advocates and African-American and other “native Muslim” advocacy efforts. W…

Obama as Lord and Savior

By Edward J. Blum

…depict a black man as Jesus; and, finally, this is not the first piece of American art by a white individual that portrays an African American figure as God’s son. Depictions of Obama as a messianic figure are nothing new. Since his emergence at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama has become an icon of salvation. One statue had him in a robe, with a neon halo around his head; another had him riding a donkey just as Jesus had done f…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…945 to the present, Jewish and African Americans were grafted into greater American civic acceptance through their children’s stories—especially those stories with overtones of suffering, exodus, and sacrifice—in modes that have long been part of the grand narratives of American religious history. I don’t say that to degrade those narratives or to promote them—but to notice how they are always with us, and how memory work is a practice, and a very…

Poets and Preachers: How Black Literature Blurs the Lines Between Sacred and Secular

By Josef Sorett

…ence in mind when writing? I wrote Spirit in the Dark both for scholars of American religion and for scholars of African American literature, as these are two of the academic fields in which I was trained. However, given the broader interest in black writers and literary movements (i.e. the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement), as well as in African American religion, I hope that the book finds a general academic audience (and perhaps even…

The Leadership Failure of Park51

By Hussein Rashid

…k it is clear that even those of us who have concerns believe in our basic American right to worship. It is the promise of the Constitution. For those of us in New York, we recognize how carpetbaggers are coming into to our city to foster mistrust and division without understanding anything about those of us who actually live here, many since before 9/11. As a New Yorker who grew up in the shadow of the Towers, there is pain in seeing how the site…

Convergence of Far-Right, Anti-Democratic Factions in the Northwest Could Provide a Model for the Rest of the Nation

By Frederick Clarkson and Cloee Cooper

…re domestic threats. Their materials are considered required reading for a new private intelligence and militia formation called, American Contingency. “We are definitely living in the last days,” the Patriot Church conference description declared, “but yet we are called to occupy until the Lord comes.” It’s clear that if the occupation comes, it will be the result of the convergence of far right factions seeking to tear down the established insti…

Unreasonable Doubt: Vincent Bugliosi Defends Agnosticism

By Eric Reitan

…bail” until further notice, expected to return to court at any time for a new trial, pending new evidence. The cloud of accusation, and the threat of incarceration, might be allowed to hang over them indefinitely. But hung juries aside, there are reasons why we don’t do that. In the face of uncertainty, we think it is better to err on the side of letting the guilty go free than on the side of shattering the lives of the innocent. And so, even if…

Hitchens Debates Conservative Evangelical: Nothing Happens

By Eric Reitan

…hose terms. The idea is that instead of trying to defend the goal that the new atheists are trying to score against, I’m standing on the sidelines defending the water cooler and shouting “missed again!” every time a new atheist kicks one straight into the net. But I think this analogy tells us more about the current state of the so-called “God debates” than it does about anything else. It seems to me that far too many people treat these debates as…

A New Book Argues That This ‘Divine Institution’ is the Key to Understanding White Evangelical Culture

By Seth Dowland

…th century white Christians defined their families against those of Native Americans and African Americans, enshrining a racialized standard as biblical. Occasionally white evangelicals reveal the racialized assumptions of family values. Bjork-James quotes Manuel Belin, a Latino who worked for an evangelical nonprofit in Colorado Springs: “Even though we picture Latino families as family units, they are a very unhealthy structure [compared] to the…

The New York Times Sunday Review has a Mormon Problem

By Joanna Brooks

…nations of Tonga and Samoa are LDS.) People of Asian, Asian Pacific, Latin American, and indigenous American descent have never been restricted from ordination, a fact Siegel blithely ignores. Church membership in the U.S. is still predominately white, a reflection of the ethnicity of the religion’s founders (and their prodigious birthrates) but global Mormonism is an entirely different story—and that’s a change LDS people welcome. In his ignoran…