Religion Dispatches
I must admit, I was pretty excited when I heard about God in America. My husband and I are big PBS fans. As the show proceeded, however, I became increasingly annoyed. We moved from the Franciscans to the Puritans, with John Winthrop ostensibly treating Anne Hutchinson as badly as the Franciscans had the Pueblos. But it seems there were no indigenous people at all in New England in those days—or else they and the Puritans got on extremely well.
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Some professional historians and scholars of American religion have criticized PBS’ God doc. This is not a surprise. After all, when has the academic community ever been comfortable watching its territory invaded by an army of people lacking PhDs? On blogs, religion and history listserves, and chat rooms around the country, academics have labeled the series “oversimplified,” “truly bizarre,” “simplistic,” “intolerable,” “uneventful,” “underwhelming.” Essentially they are calling the series not enough of an “intellectual endeavor.”
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Last week’s six-hour PBS documentary, God in America, wasn’t really about God in America. Nor was it about religions in America. Following a fairly conventional narrative in mainstream discourse (albeit not one adopted by the contemporary Christian right), the series…
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Modern Family, which won the Emmy award for best television comedy after its first season, just turned on religion. But what was really interesting about this episode, called “Earthquake,” was the way it…
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If art is the new religion, then museums are the new temples; temples uniquely suited to the vagaries of spirituality in the modern age.
That is the suggestive idea explored in Marcia Brennan’s new book, Curating Consciousness. Brennan introduces us to James Johnson Sweeney…
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Some of John Mellencamp’s latest offering was recorded in a black church in Georgia, where he got baptized to boot. What does it mean when a place like First African comes to serve as a stand-in for authenticity? What’s the myth behind the music?
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The premise that Religious Studies was a weak blend of esotericism and elitism prior to recent years—but is reviving through putting all that in the past—is wrong on factual grounds. More perniciously, if this analysis informs institutional strategies in an era of downsizing, it could be downright dangerous for the future of the discipline.
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Everyone is in agreement that desecration is a bad thing. Across cultures and throughout time, most any human being would say that dousing a dead person’s tomb with millions of gallons of crude oil is wrong. We should take advantage of this rare instance of human unanimity, and use the spiritual appeal of honoring the dead to help frame political arguments about ecological preservation and restoration.
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This week, the world will stop turning; or at least it will for the daytime soap opera “As The World Turns,” which officially ends after 53 years. But if we remember the soap opera solely as a torrid celebration of sexual transgression—or as a frivolous time-waster for bored housewives—we miss understanding something crucial about the relationship between popular culture and morality.
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Artist and theologian Mary Button went to Kenya for a Youth Peace Summit, made banners and signs with kids from all over Africa, bought a skirt that commemorated Barack Obama’s election, and came home to create a series of paintings on her experience.
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