Paul Harvey We’ve got another post or two underway about the current predictable response to the proposed Cordoba Center (no, not a “mosque at Ground Zero”) in lower Manhattan. I found this video tour most instructive — a photo collage of some of the other establishments which currently reside on the “hallowed ground.” Maybe Newt Gingrich has visited some of these , who knows? [A side note: nothing in this blog post should be taken as a criticism, in the slightest, of the great 1970s glam-punk band the New York Doll s, whose work paved the way for one of my all-time favorite film musicals: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
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The New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club Says: Refudiate the Casbah! Refudiate the Casbah!
President Obama, after saying that building a mosque at Ground Zero fit our “commitment to religious freedom,” backtracked, saying he wasn’t commenting on the ‘wisdom’ of building it so close to ‘hallowed ground.’ A Fox News poll showed that while 61 percent of Americans believe that Cordoba House has a constitutional right to build near Ground Zero, 64 percent believe it is not appropriate to do so. Does Obama’s hedging show a lack of…Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.
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Religious freedom vs. wisdom
Paul Harvey Earlier we posted an announcement on the conference “Divided by Faith,” a symposium at Indiana Wesleyan University about Michael Emerson’s and Christian Smith’s book of that titl e. Below is the conference schedule; as you will see, blog contributors Philip Luke Sinitiere and Edward J. Blum, and friend of the blog Charles Irons, are among the participants.
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Divided by Faith: Conference Schedule
Randall Stephens Listen to Sunday’s All Things Considered (NPR) for a feature on black preaching from the 18th century to the present . Guy Raz speaks with Martha Simmons about her new edited volume, Preaching with Sacred Fire . The story includes audio clips of 20th-century sermons and some insight on how black preaching through the centuries opens a window onto the African-American experience
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Black Preaching and African-American History
The Dove World Outreach Center (the name’s a bit ironic, considering they only have 80 members) in Gainesville is going to have to pay taxes on a portion of their property because it seems they lease out part of it to a for-profit business. Think of all the possible commercial operations a church could set up.
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Anti-Islamic Gainesville Church Has a Furniture Store Out Back
In the memoir Eat, Pray, Love, writer Elizabeth Gilbert gives up her entire way of life to spend a year traveling the world, finding spiritual enlightenment along the way. Julia Roberts, who plays Gilbert’s character in the movie version out this week, apparently found enlightenment of her own through the role, revealing that she has become a practicing Hindu
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Eat, pray, travel?
Paul Harvey Don’t miss our contributor Christopher Jones’s piece over at Juvenile Instructor : ” ‘ Owned by the White People’: America and Native Americans in Church History Sunday School Lessons, 1934. ” Going through some boxes of old material while packing and moving, Chris reflects on Mormon providentialist interpretations, as communicated in Sunday School lessons, on the founding of America, and on relations with Native peoples. Some of it is kind of standard-issue stuff for that period: heroic and virtuous Pilgrims, God preparing the way for the coming of our Christian civilization, and so on.
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Owned by the White People
Paul Harvey We’ve had a number of posts here in the past where folks have reflected on their experiences researching in various archives. One of my most enjoyable was a couple of weeks years ago at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, where I dipped a bit into the massive archives of the American Missionary Association, the Congregationalist enterprise which after the Civil War was heavily involved in education for the freedpeople. At the time of this research, I was thinking of a good deal of the literature on postwar black education, leading to “industrial” schools; that literature focused on missionary paternalism.
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Education for Liberation: The American Missionary Association from Reconstruction through Civil Rights
Dan Terry, 64, had been in Afghanistan for 40 years, 30 of them under appointment by the United Methodist Church’s national board, the General Board of Global Missions. Apparently, on at least one occasion, Terry and his wife were here in Lakeland at the Florida Conference’s annual meeting.
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Slain Aid Worker in Afghanistan Had Florida, Methodist Connections
Paul Harvey Once again, it has happened, and I am happy. Every time I think my field of study (religion in the South) is disappearing as a distinctive entity — every time I start assuming that regional homogeneity is the order of the day, that immigration has fundamentally changed religious patterns, that the Journal of Southern Religion will have to close up shop — Gallup or somebody does a survey and finds plus ça change, and all that.
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Survey Says . . . . . You Southernists Still have a Job!