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Female Deacons: Pope Francis Walks It Back, Women Clergy Weigh In

By Kaya Oakes

…those religions, with the first Orthodox female rabbi recently hired by an American synagogue, but the Mormon excommunication of Kate Kelly, an advocate for opening the Mormon priesthood for women, unfortunately mirrors a familiar pattern for American Catholic advocates of women’s ordination. In the most high-profile case, peace activist Father Roy Bourgeois was dismissed by his religious order in 2012 for participating in the ordination of a Roma…

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…

The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

By Lauren Sutton

…ress (May 29, 2015) In Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Stoll, a professor at Texas Tech University, explores the religious roots of environmentalist concepts of nature. Doing so, he challenges the preconception that conservationism and religion are inherently hostile towards each other. Stoll documents the role of Calvinism, Congregationalism, and Presbyterianism in the creation of our national parks,…

Trump’s Fear and Loathing Won’t Silence The Nation’s Sole LGBT Muslim Organization

By Omar Sarwar

…isiting Muslim counseling centers for specialized psychotherapy in greater numbers. Far from being an abstract term, intersectionality is necessary for the very survival of minority communities. Above all, though, it’s MASGD’s own community who must take priority, and that entails strengthening LGBT Muslims’ bonds with other progressive movements who seek justice and equality for all Americans. The group is fiscally sponsored by the National Queer…

American Religion By the Numbers: A Pew Survey Roundup

By The Editors

…precipitous decline—and the news that the religiously unaffiliated now outnumber Catholics—is perhaps only surprising to those who haven’t attended a Catholic church recently. Continue reading U.S. CHRISTIANITY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE U.S. CHRISTIANITY By Richard Flory In the cluster of comment on the recently released report on the changing American religious landscape from the Pew Research Center, we have seen two basic story lines: the U.S. is “l…

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…

Religious Leaders Condemn National Prayer Breakfast; Offer Alternative American Prayer Hour

By Sarah Posner

…-gays bill pending in the Ugandan parliament. “Prayer is a good thing, and Americans ought to gather to pray, but we better be careful what we pray for,” said the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the Ninth Bishop of New Hampshire and the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal church, speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday morning. “We have a duty to confront those who are praying for those things that would break God’s heart.” “I call upon our pr…

Keep Jews Interesting: It’s Time to Stop Being Defined by Anti-Semitism

By Shaul Magid

…have the chance to create something different. The final word goes to the American scholar of Judaica Jacob Neusner. In his 1981 book Stranger at Home: The Holocaust, Zionism, and American Judaism, Neusner argued that an obsession with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, painting the Jew as a victim—the foundation of American Jews’ civil religion—is essentially an act of Jewish self-hatred because it perpetuates derogatory Jewish stereotypes. The sol…

I Want a Perfect Body

By Jeremy Biles

…godliness. The idea that “fit bodies… signify fitter souls” permeates the American consciousness with anxiety about the body while shaping beliefs about beauty. Today, as Zed Nelson wants to show in his work, the forces of globalization have propelled the American conception of the perfect body into the world at large, where it has merged with and inflected traditional Western ideals of beauty. Nelson writes, “The promise of bodily improvement is…