On October 26 and 27, 2012, Vincent Lloyd and Jonathon Kahn will convene a workshop at Syracuse University on “Race and Secularism in America.” From the conference website …
Posts Tagged ‘United States’
August 7th, 2012
Loss of faith in religious institutions
posted by Candice ScharfNPR recently reported on a Gallup poll, which showed Americans’ faith in organized religion and religious institutions has declined.
September 23rd, 2011
America plus nothing
posted by John D. Boy
But Sweet Heaven When I Die is, first and foremost, a book about loss, about death, transience, neglect, and quitting. These are the recurring themes in almost every one of the book’s thirteen chapters. The loss of the American west to real estate developers, the loss of a beloved uncle to a meaningless war, the killing of veteran activist Brad Will in Oaxaca in 2006, the neglect of the Yiddish language and its masterful authors, or the devastation of a writer failing to find an audience. In one chapter, Sharlet notes that all things we become invested in and pin our identities on have a half-life. With his consciousness of the inevitable decay befalling all things, Sharlet proves he has taken Cornel West’s lesson of the “death shudder” to heart. “To learn how to die in this way,” Sharlet quotes West in a chapter on the philosopher, “is to learn how to live.” And although the final chapter of When I Die is called “Born, Again,” Sharlet resists the temptation to end on an upbeat note, leaving us instead with a blues note.
March 3rd, 2011
Race and Christian identity
posted by John D. BoyReligion News Service reports that a new book about Christian identity is inadvertently tapping into the U.S.’s racial history.
January 18th, 2011
Three myths of American religious freedom
posted by John D. BoyWriting on the occasion of the National Day of Religious Freedom—observed in the United States on January 16—historian David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom, argues that the story of religious freedom is a “myth” that “distorts the current debate about religion in public life.” The notions of church–state separation, religious decline and exceptional liberty—all three of which are central to the narrative of religious freedom in the U.S.—are mythical and foreclose productive discussion about religion in American society, Sehat argues.
July 21st, 2010
“Can you do counterterrorism without theology?”
posted by Jake Alter“Can you do counterterrorism without theology?” Increasingly, critics are calling into question the Western strategy of supporting moderate and more “acceptable” forms of Islam throughout the world. In response to the question above, posted at The Guardian, Mehdi Hasan, a senior editor at the New Statesman, argues that “it is not the business of the state to back one or other interpretation of Islam – or any other faith.”
May 24th, 2010
Shrinking no more
posted by John D. BoyTwo recent studies conducted by the Christian organization LifeWay Research and supervised by missiological thought leader Ed Stetzer provide an enhanced quantitative picture of the phenomenon of “church planting”—the founding of new churches—in the contemporary United States.
April 21st, 2010
Education and American civil religion
posted by John D. BoyEducation Review, an open-access online journal, reviews the recently published Public Education, America’s Civil Religion: A Social History (Teachers College Press, 2009) by Carl Bankston III and Stephen Caldas. While critical of some aspects of the argument laid out in the book, the reviewer is intrigued by the authors’ account of the development of schooling in the United States through the concept of “civil religion” and their skeptical perspective on Americans’ devotion to education.
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