In the News: Captain America, Serpents, Google’s Gods, and more!
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
Tag: prison
In the News: Prisons Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
The Different Kinds of Hunger: Ramadan at Guantanamo
By Sajida Jalalzai. A hunger strike at Guantanamo during Ramadan reveals contradictions about religion, ethics, and prisoners’ rights. Continue Reading →
Vegan Criminals
Amy Levin: You’re in jail. What will you eat on Thanksgiving day? Most media coverage of religion in prison over the past year was about Rep. Peter King’s (R- NY) excessive concern with “prislam.” Regardless of how successfully King and his constituents played the public’s fear, the conversation managed to boil down to how dangerous religion is or is not for the “vulnerable” criminalized subject. Indeed, people tend to get nervous around minority rights, especially if said minorities have broken the law.
Analogue Media and the Politics of Print Nostalgia
Angela Zito: The Bible as a book, printed, physically available for Christian devotion, remains a powerful and contested artifact in this digital age. Just winding up its US tour, a traveling exhibition of the Bible in China—entitled “Thy Word is Truth: the Bible Ministry Exhibition of the Protestant Church in China”—might have slipped my notice. Today, however, I saw a posting in the online newsletter of the US China Catholic Bureau of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops news service about a planned counter exhibit of a small portion of a hand-copied “prison bible” smuggled out of the Chinese labor reform camp system ten years ago, and recently donated to the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. Continue Reading →
Ashley Baxstrom and Amy Levin: A man was murdered last night. Continue Reading →
Believing in Prison
On May 1, our sister site, Killing the Buddha, hosted an event in midtown NYC titled, “The Prison-Spirituality Complex.” You can listen to the entire event here. Nathan Schneider, editor at Killing the Buddha, writes at his own site, The Row Boat, “My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.” You can read Nathan’s interview with panel participant and author of The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith, in this month’s issue of Tricycle (subscription only). Continue Reading →
British Patriotism
Much debate around the legislation known as the Patriot Acts has focussed on whether they will lead to civil liberties violations. But a story about the Patriot Act’s British counterpart, the Terrorism Act, Continue Reading →