Paul Harvey The history of race and marriage has been the subject of many books in recent years by Peter Wallenstein, Renee Romano, and many others. Here’s a new entrant in the field, which puts religion front and center of the subject; I’m reprinting here the review from Choice, for the new work by Fay Botham , one of the current participants in the Young Scholars in American Religion program: Botham, Fay . Almighty God created the races: Christianity, interracial marriage, & American law .
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Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law
From the AHA website , information on a grant I had some years ago that led to some very fruitful research time: Grant of the Week: Oral History Research Fellowships from Baylor University The Baylor University Institute for Oral History welcomes applications for one annual fellowship for the academic year 2010-11, open to individuals in any field who can benefit from the holdings of Baylor’s oral history collection. The fellowship is designed to bring scholars to Waco, Texas, to work with oral history materials (covering topics of religion, Central Texas history, Texas Baptist history, Baylor history, civil rights, music, theater, historic preservation, judicial history, business history, and rural life) housed in The Texas Collection special library. The fellowship carries a stipend of $3,000 .
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Baylor Oral History Research Fellowship Grant
Paul Harvey We’ve blogged here before about the Interfaith Worker Justice project, important work organized by Kim Bobo. Just a quick note here about their new publication, A Worker Justice Reader (Orbis Books), which collects writings both historical and contemporary about religion and the labor movement. From the book’s website: The national organization Interfaith Worker Justice has gathered together key writings that identify and explain essential labor and economic issues fromthe perspectives of a variety of faith traditions, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim
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Worker Justice Reader
Illegal immigrants are flouting U.S. laws, but does affluent America (or Arizona for that matter) have a larger moral or spiritual obligation to help illegal immigrants who are trying to better their lives? What about religious obligations to welcome the stranger
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Stopping illegal immigrants with immoral laws?
Art Remillard (Warning: Lost spoiler alert!) Yesterday, Lost resolved six seasons of mystery not by bluntly revealing every secret, but by emphasizing that the road to individual redemption passes through a community. In a Flannery O’Connor- esque manner, many of the characters reached this point of enlightenment only when facing death
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Lost in Thought About Lost
Kelly Baker We now have a twitter account , so please start following us there , on facebook , or just by browsing here. Twitter and facebook means that we can reach you as soon as a new post is up. For those of you who incessantly check the blog to procrastinate, we are bringing procrastination to you automatically (Or is that just me?).
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Twitter (USReligionBlog)
Paul Harvey Let’s move from the ridiculous (see yesterday’s post) to the sublime: A really fine new book to recommend, more about religious history than I would have guessed initially: Suzanne E. Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death .
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The Colored Embalmer: Homegoings, Capitalism, and African American Civil Rights
Paul Harvey Quite a number of excellent scholars, including my friends Tisa Wenger and Winni Sullivan, have essays in this very important new volume to call to your attention: Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (Macmillan, 2010). Tisa’s piece, which I was privileged to read in draft form, is entitled “God and the Constitution: Towards a History of American Secularisms”; in it she discusses a number of nineteenth-century groups who fought to establish “secularism” as a viable philosophy in a very evangelical United States — including atheists as well as people who effectively could be described as “Protestant but still secularists.” What becomes clear, at least from the portions of the book I looked at, is that defining “secularism” is about as tricky as defining “religion,” and that, like juxtaposing slavery and freedom, the one cannot be defined without the other. The book’s description: C omparative Secularisms in a Global Age explores the history and politics of secularism and the public role of religion in France, India, Turkey, and the United States
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Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age
Aided by faith, not to mention a few generous checks, church leaders announced Tuesday morning the completion of a $15.5 million fundraising campaign to preserve and restore the city’s Spanish colonial missions slightly more than two years after it originally began.
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Missions fundraising goal complete
Paul Harvey First, Patrick Buchanan complains that there are too many Jews on the Supreme Court , and it’s about to get worse with Elena Kagan. (N.B.: Someone calculated that 32% of Supreme Court Justices have been Episcopalians, who represent under 2% of the population, but never mind). White Protestants and Catholics are, of course, the “targets of liberal bias.” Now Daniel Pipes is all upset that there are too many Arab-American Muslims such as Rima Fakih winning beauty contests (and yes, of course the Presidency as well) — heavens, even Anisah Rasheed, the new Miss North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University! Affirmative action run amok! My oh my, what is the world ever coming to?
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OMG! Jews and Muslims Are Taking Over America! Poor Poor Pitiful Me.