a review of religion and media
“The Patient Body” is a monthly column by Ann Neumann about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. This month: Competing stories of why America is special and its elders are going hungry. Continue Reading →
An excerpt from Making Moderate Islam: Sufism, Service, and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy (Stanford University Press, 2016) by Rosemary R. Corbett. With an introduction by the author. Continue Reading →
A round-up of the week’s religion news. Continue Reading →
A Review of No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, by David Stowe, The University of North Carolina Press, 291 pages
by Garrett Baer
There is a certain (dead) art to the mixtape, difficult to theorize but easy enough to hear. It’s not quite captured in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, though the fuzzy explanation offered by Hornby’s Rob Fleming gets close:
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind”, but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.
Though David Stowe is a professor of English and religious studies and No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism was published by an academic press, don’t let the jacket—or Stowe’s ambitious claim to demonstrate that Christian pop music of the sixties and seventies was central in laying the very “groundwork for the reorientation of American society, politics, and religious culture”—fool you: No Sympathy is a mixtape, and it follows Hornby’s rules to a T. Continue Reading →
Elissa Lerner: Last Thursday, after Senate republicans filibustered their way out of passing the Zadroga Bill, also known as the 9/11 health care bill which would provide $7.4 billion in health aid to ailing first responders, few took notice. However, on the Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart took the issue quite seriously. Little did we know that staying to work and pass the bill would require the Senate to denigrate Christmas! Continue Reading →
12 January 2006 Do you feel more or less persecuted than last year? Georgia Republican state representativesplay to their constituencies, with some after-the-fact Christmas- (and possibly Easter) saving legislation, on Continue Reading →