Amanda J. Lucia That autoethnographic experience reinforced to me the ways in which these scenes privilege healthy and wealthy bodies, which also interfaces with their propensity toward whiteness.
Religious Exoticism and White Utopias: 7 Questions for Amanda J. Lucia
David Wojnarowicz’s Christ: Symbols of Hope, Corruption, and Violence
Colonial Violence, Sacred Power, and Gods of Indian Country: 7 Questions for Jennifer Graber
Jennifer Graber A crucial part of the Kiowa survival story is that they survived American occupation and ritual interactions with sacred power–as well as adaptation of those rituals.
The Fantasy of Analytics: Religion, Fantasy Sports, and the NFL Draft
L. Benjamin Rolsky In this sense, it may behoove us as scholars of American popular culture and religion to begin considering sport fandom more from a Catholic model of religious studies rather than the more common Protestant model that has overdetermined much of the study of religion since its inception according to the motif of “choice.”
On Gender and American Judaism: 7 Questions with Sarah Imhoff
Sarah Imhoff Men have gender too, and that gender is not unchanging or ahistorical.
Almanacs and Religious Life? 7 Questions for Troy Tomlin
Troy Tomlin I wondered what these little books could tell me about wider patterns and disruptions in early American religion and, most importantly, what ordinary men and women may have thought about them.
Fashionable Intolerance
Kelly Baker A couple of months ago, I started watching the first season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. In the premiere episode, Kimmy and the three other “mole ladies” are rescued by a SWAT team from an underground bunker.
7 Questions for Andrea R. Jain
Andrea R. Jain One difficult thing about writing Selling Yoga, though it was not surprising, is that contemporary popular culture defies the ability to locate any cultural object at one site or sites. And in the case of pop-culture yoga, we cannot locate it in my chosen sites alone. However, as a practical move, I had to select my examples as windows into the incalculable sites of the construction, dissemination, and practice of yoga. I had to carefully select from case studies in my effort to demonstrate that the postural practice we most associate with yoga today underwent global popularization as a consequence of its coincidence with transnational cultural developments.
Religious Cultures Under the Radar: Jews of African Descent
Judith Weisenfeld On October 4, 2015, the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, a body overseeing a group of congregations of Jews of African descent, voted to elevate Capers Funnye, rabbi of Chicago’s Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation and first cousin to Michele Obama, to the position of Chief Rabbi. Installed on October 24 at a ceremony in his home synagogue, Funnye became the third Chief Rabbi in the history of the Israelite Board, which has its origin in the Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation founded in Harlem in the early 20th century by St. Kitts native Rabbi Wentworth Matthew and the first Chief Rabbi.