religion

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  9/17/2021
  

  The Complex Politics of Vaccine Resistance

  by Nicole Hemmer

  Despite the fact that no major religion forbids vaccination, vaccine resisters often leverage religious exemptions to gain moral authority for what are often political or conspiracy-based views. Public health advocates need to recognize that exemption claims are a tool, not a belief.

• 
• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  9/17/2021
  

  Policing Religious Exemptions to Vaccines

  A lawsuit against Creighton University, a Jesuit institution, would expand the justification for religious exemptions to vaccination from explicit declarations of opposition by a religious body to any impulse of individual conscience. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Revealer
  9/9/2021
  

  Religious Militancy Overseas and Its Messages at Home

  "Recognizing jihad as a diverse and historically evolving practice makes it possible to cast aside the biggest misconception in the West, namely that it is an instantiation of medieval barbarism left over from less enlightened times."

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• 9/12/2021
  

  Scammed From the Beginning: Rejecting Expertise as an American Value

  by Guy Lancaster

  When Americans demand and take unauthorized medications to treat COVID-19, they aren't indulging a new conspiratorialism but are tapping into currents of American cultural and religious history that have always rejected established authority. 

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/26/2021
  

  Britney Spears is Part of a Long History of Celebrity Religious Conversion (and Fan Skepticism)

  by Rebecca L. Davis

  The skepticism that has often accompanied public conversions by celebrities, from Sammy Davis, Jr. to Britney Spears, reflects prevalent assumptions about what religious experiences are authentic. 

• 
• 8/8/2021
  

  Recessional: The WASP and God (excerpt)

  by Michael Knox Beran

  "We  may  enjoy  the  poetry  of  the  fair  sheepfold  without  believing  in  the shepherd himself. But when we come to the achievement of the WASPs, their public service, their standards of conduct, their faith in the possibility of regeneration, we find that it owed a good deal to their conviction that there is a shepherd."

• 
• SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
  8/2/2021
  

  We've Begun to Confront Christian White Nationalism. But What About the Source Text?

  by Dianne M. Stewart

  Critics of emergent White Christian Nationalism too often stop short of a key point: the Bible's explicit endorsement of war, conquest and genocide back up an eliminationist political outlook on the right. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  6/11/2021
  

  Is There a Way to Dial Down the Political Hatred?

  by Molly Worthen

  Are fanatical political opinions a refiguring of the need for spiritual meaning in a secular society? What are the prospects for dialogue and coexistence? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  6/7/2021
  

  ‘Lady of Guadalupe’ Avoids Tough Truths About the Catholic Church and Indigenous Genocide

  by Rebecca Janzen

  "Although it portrays the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe for a broad audience, ultimately this film sanitizes the real-life brutality of the Church toward Indigenous peoples in the 16th century."

• 
• SOURCE: LitHub
  5/4/2021
  

  How Malcolm X Inspired John Coltrane to Embrace Islamic Spirituality

  by Richard Brent Turner

  John Coltrane's embrace of influences from religious music from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, profoundly influential to the Black Arts movement and African American spirituality, was influenced by Malcolm X. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/15/2021
  

  Whither the Religious Left?

  by Matthew Sitman

  Has the considerable effort spent for decades to court a "religious left" as a Democratic constituency been a waste of time? Why haven't faith-based social justice movements been more signiicant in the party's base? 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/6/2021
  

  Retro Report Presents: How an Abstinence Pledge in the ’90s Shamed a Generation of Evangelicals

  Retro Report's latest collaboration with the New York Times examines the roots and social impact of Evangelical purity culture, both for individuals and American society's approach to sexuality. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/29/2021
  

  Church Membership in the U.S. has Fallen Below the Majority for the First Time in Nearly a Century

  Political Scientist Ryan Burge predicts that there will no longer be a single dominant religion in the United States in 30 years, due principally to the rise of non-affiliation. 

• 
• SOURCE: Crain's Chicago Business
  2/21/2021
  

  America's Churches are Now Polarized, Too

  The Trump era has concentrated longstanding differences about the role of faith in American life and the obligations of the faithful to act in the world. During the McCarthy era, the Republican establishment pushed back against attacks on clergy by the far right. Will something similar happen today? 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/16/2021
  

  Henry Louis Gates Jr. on African-American Religion

  Jon Meacham reviews Henry Louis Gates's book on the Black church in America; Gates seeks to recover the traditions of social and political activism in churches against skeptics who identify religion with conservatism and quietude. 

• 
• 2/14/2021
  

  Opportunities for a Catholic President, Then and Now

  by Patrick Lacroix

  Polling of religious voters might encourage Democrats to give up on reaching them. John F. Kennedy's experience shows that Joe Biden, as the second Catholic President, could succeed in narrowing the gap. 

• 
• 2/14/2021
  

  History, Evidence and the Ethics of Belief

  by Guy Lancaster

  Untrammelled freedom of belief has been enshrined as an American civic virtue. The nation, democracy, and possibly the planet are imperiled without a collective commitment to respect belief only to the extent available evidence supports it. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  1/25/2021
  

  Bad Religion, or Bad Faith?

  by Caleb Smith

  A scholar of American religion takes issue with a recent call to see fundamentalist zeal as a danger to democracy and civil society; secularism, too, has underwritten massive campaigns of state violence. 

• 
• 1/31/2021
  

  A Devil’s Dozen of the Most Important Religion Stories of 2020

  by Ed Simon

  Many people would like to leave 2020 behind. HNN Contributing Editor Ed Simon compiles, for those readers ready for a distanced reflection on a year that may have tested faith, a roundup of the best stories at the intersection of religion and history. 

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  1/21/2021
  

  Bad Religion in the Ivory Tower

  by Jacques Berlinerblau

  Have scholars of religion and politics missed the rise of militant Christian nationalism because they follow an unspoken rule to "always posit religion at its best, secularism at its worst"?