Oprah Winfrey is the single most powerful woman in media. She presides over a multi-billion dollar empire as both mogul and star. As a model of American womanhood, she is distinctly contemporary: never before has the predominantly white, middle-class public accepted such an anomalous spokesperson. She is single, childless, and co-habiting with the distinctively named Stedman Graham, who guards the few slivers of privacy she has left; her soul mate is her best friend, Gayle King. These factors alone would seem to mark her populist origins as more of an iconoclast than an icon; a free-thinker, cultural feminist, and a liberal.
Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
March 10th, 2011
Will Oprah Winfrey save us all?
posted by Deirdre EnglishTags: American politics, American religion, Barack Obama
Posted in The Gospel of an Icon | 1 Comment »
October 26th, 2010
Ceding ground to propagandists
posted by Aaron WeinsteinAs I noted in August, one in five Americans mistakenly believes that President Obama is secretly a Muslim. Yet more disconcerting than the fact that this propaganda has been so widely disseminated, is that one of Obama’s most recent strategies for combating the problem is simply giving in.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, media, Sikhism, The New York Times
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
September 30th, 2010
Holy ground zero?
posted by Aaron WeinsteinMore than nine years (and a few weeks) have now passed since the events of 9/11, and as Religion in America blogger Paul Matzko noted on the attacks’ ninth anniversary earlier this month, the religious overtones of how Americans remember that day are palpable.
Tags: 9/11, American politics, Barack Obama, civil religion, terrorism
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
September 9th, 2010
Jacoby: fixation on Obama’s religion is unprecedented and un-American
posted by David WalkerIn her Washington Post opinion column, The Spirited Atheist, Susan Jacoby reflects upon the “billions of words” published in newspapers, blogs, and articles about Obama’s religion, arguing that “there is nothing ordinary, or traditional in American politics, about subjecting a president’s private faith to this kind of scrutiny.”
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, church and state, media, Susan Jacoby
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
September 2nd, 2010
Black crescent, white cross
posted by Vincent P. PecoraBy now, everyone has seen the Newsweek poll indicating that a majority of Republicans believes President Barack Obama sympathizes with radical Islamists who would like to impose Shari‘a on the United States. Certainly, political debates in America generally get fairly nasty whenever the defense of “the American way of life” is at issue. And in America, such threats have had a long history of steering the popular imagination back to the question of race. But this time around, the mixture is especially volatile, I think, because race is once again being stirred into a mixture with religion.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, fascism, Father Charles Coughlin, Glenn Beck, Islam, populism, race, religion in the U.S.
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | 3 Comments »
August 20th, 2010
Perceiving the President
posted by Aaron WeinsteinA recent Pew Research poll indicates that an increasing percentage of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, Christianity, church and state, Islam
Posted in here & there | 1 Comment »
August 20th, 2010
Religious freedom, wisdom, and Park51
posted by Jessica PolebaumAs the mid-term electoral season enters its final months, the growing controversy over the construction of Park51, the now well-known Muslim community center proposed to be built near the former site of the World Trade Center, has rocketed from an issue of local concern to one of apparently national import.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, Islam, New York City, Park51, religious freedom, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
August 12th, 2010
Obama bears witness (to the past of a tricky phrase)
posted by Justin ReynoldsTo “bear witness:” Obama’s phrase was widely quoted but not seriously analyzed. Some attacked (and some still attack) the President for leaving the protesters in the lurch; to these commentators, “witness” meant passive spectatorship when a robust intervention was needed. Others found the Administration’s aloofness a shrewd tactic that gave the good guys breathing room while respecting Iranian sovereignty. Few, as far as I know, took note of the Christian roots of the phrase. That’s too bad, because they help to shed light on Obama as a politician, a diplomat with “realist” predilections, and a national phenomenon—and how he manages to be all three at once.
Tags: Barack Obama, Bear Witness, Hope, politics, World Council of Churches
Posted in Notes from the field (2010) | No Comments »
July 22nd, 2010
Separating public space
posted by Amanda KaplanConcluding a class trip to the Supreme Court, Maureen Rigo and her class from Wickenburg Christian Academy, Wickenburg, AZ, stopped to pray on the Oval Plaza in front of the Court steps. The Supreme Court police ushered the teacher and her class from the steps, having deemed their behavior unlawful—actions that bring to the fore questions of the religious neutrality of public space and the application of the First Amendment.
Tags: Barack Obama, church and state, First Amendment, language, prayer, public sphere, religious freedom
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
July 20th, 2010
Au contraire, Mr. Beck
posted by Kathryn ReklisOn July 13, 2010, Glenn Beck made liberation theology—and especially Black Theology—the subject of his televised program. The real subject of his complaint was twofold: liberation theology is “a perversion of God” that mistakes Marxism for the plain meaning of the Gospels, which, for Beck, are self-evidently about individual salvation, and liberation theology does away with the language of merit, convincing the down-and-out that they are victims deserving of a handout instead of hard work. The inconsistencies of this message, along with Beck’s misreading and simplification of the various complex traditions of Christian liberation theology have not gone unnoticed in rebuttals and reprisals.
Tags: American politics, Barack Obama, Christianity, Glenn Beck, liberation theology, media, theology
Posted in here & there | No Comments »
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