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MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Needs to Get a Grip on his Issues with Mormonism

By Joanna Brooks

…haracterized pro-equality Catholics as not being representative of general American sentiment. “Is this some weird subset of the American population, some little cult? Did I forget to mention that Catholic is the largest single religion in the United States? The people we are talking about are real Americans,” said O’Donnell. “When Glenn Beck slanders those millions and millions and millions of liberal American Catholics, he does so because he…

“Americans Hate Muslims, Too” (And Other Impediments to U.S. Advocacy for Religious Freedom Abroad)

By Chad Bauman

…e value the expressions of evangelical Christian piety so common among the American political class, and do not dismiss them—as many Americans do—as cynical political machination. Stories in respected media outlets warn of aggressive evangelical campaigns “emanating from America,” and “backed by the highest of the land,” and are often accompanied by sound bites or pictures—in this case of George W. Bush, Jr., speaking in front of a large mural of…

Prison as Resurrection

By Caleb Smith

…onversations. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? The American prison has become a disaster and a scandal in recent years. My book tries to show how powerfully the prison has shaped American culture over a longer history. The prison has been a source of gothic nightmares but also, more surprisingly, a scene where we have rehearsed some of our most cherished fantasies: about the individual’s capacity to remake himself or hersel…

AR-15 Lapel Pins are More Than Political Provocation — They’re Symbols of the Violence at the Heart of White Christian Nationalism

By Annika Brockschmidt

…deem them too inclusive, and alter them to showcase who they see as “real” Americans—with the addition of the “thin blue line,” for example, to showcase their contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight against police brutality. And while the American flag is not seen by all Americans as the inclusive symbol that it purports to be, replacing it with the preferred gun of White supremacists out to kill Americans they deemed unworthy s…

In This Week’s LGBT Recap: Are Gay Priests Overdue for a Stonewall Moment?

By Peter Montgomery

…e fairy-tale story of irreversible progress in LGBT rights is a very white American story. Americans of color have long known that progress is not linear. LGBT people from countries like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey, among others, can tell you what it feels like when attitudes make a U-turn. The laws in these countries are benign, compared to the many places in the world where homosexual behavior is punishable by imprisonment or even death, but tha…

Keepers of History or Dangerous Idols: The Case Against Statues From an Unlikely Source

By David Zvi Kalman

…eliminate the idea of America. The tie between memory and statuary is more American than Americans realize. Given that many Americans don’t know that the Civil War happened after the War of Independence, and that the president this week misidentified a sculpture while defending its importance to memory, it’s questionable whether our memorializing strategies have been all that successful in the first place. Given this dubious track record, we would…

Spiritualism and Sex Meet Evangelical Censorship, 19th-Century-Style

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…e the country in Christian terms—in this instance, to enforce the norms of American literary, sexual, and religious expression? 2) Would women—in this case, ambitiously learned ones like Craddock—be able to claim academic standing, spiritual authority, and social equality in American public life? 3) Was visionary experience an empowering capacity or a debilitating clinical symptom? Specifically, could Craddock’s mysticism be contained within one p…

Mercy, Justice, and the Telephone Company

By Daniel Schultz

…bership, kinship or membership in other intermediate groups. You become an American by renouncing your ethnic identity, in other words, and by assimilating into American society, as defined by the political entity of the United States. Illegal immigrants are seen as refusing to participate in this national identity — they don’t “play by the rules,” they don’t speak the language, they take jobs from good hard-working Americans — and therefore they…

Heaven is All-American

By Mary Valle

…he “baby who died in Mommy’s tummy is alive and well and living in Heaven” news to their mom, Cassie is sitting at the kitchen table with headphones on, rocking out and ignoring all of it. Jokes aside, Heaven is for Real made me uneasy—although Pastor Burpo in real life spun the straw of Colton’s scanty “visions” into a fair amount of gold, what about the rest of the “hard working Americans” in Imperial, Nebraska? What about us all? We just have c…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…rresponding phases of the moon, so one night it may only be dimly lit (the new moon); or fully flooded with light (for the full moon). Returning to my point, namely that the UAE is a more Indian Ocean-oriented, and South Asian, society than a stereotypically Arab one, this mosque clearly continues in the vein of Mughal and Indo-Islamic architecture and owes far less to traditionally Arab-Islamic architecture. Compare to the Taj Mahal, and Badshahi…