As we head into the weekend, here are some of the articles on religion that we’ve found interesting this week:

• Jeremy Stahl, “It’s Like a Safari, and We’re the Zebras,” Slate. Inside the bizarre tourist trade at Harlem’s Sunday church services.
• Martin Marty, “Like the Present, Only Longer: The Future of Religion,” Patheos.
• Charles Randall Paul and John W. Morehead, “I Believe You’re Wrong: The Trouble with Tolerance,” Religion Dispatches. An argument for a pluralism that does not shy away from “respectful contestation.”

Finally, a video about another foiled Qur’an burning.

Yesterday afternoon, I tried to buy a Qur’an. I used to own two copies of the Qur’an (or, to be precise, a translation of the meaning of the Qur’an). One I bought as a textbook, and read, and one was mailed to me by Muslims trying to proselytize, but a search of my bookcases and attic revealed that neither copy had survived recent relocations. And so, I walked to the center of town to buy another copy.

I’m not the only person in the market for a Qur’an this week. According to Amazon, the Oxford World’s Classics edition is currently at 72 and climbing in their bestsellers list, meaning that Amazon is selling a lot of Qur’ans. Demand is being spurred by two related events: plans to build an Islamic community center in New York City, and plans to burn Qur’ans in Gainesville, Florida.

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PBS’ “American Experience” series will debut a new production this fall: God in America, a six-hour documentary detailing “400 years of the country’s enduring quest for religious liberty and its impact on society, politics, and the spiritual experience of Americans.” The doc is set to premiere on October 11, 12, and 13.

Check out the program summaries and the press release. You can also watch the trailer:

With Stephen Prothero, professor at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t, as chief editorial consultant, I’m excited about the possibilities this series could have for the understanding of American religious history in the public sphere.

HT = Religion in American History

At Religion in America, we’ve been surprisingly silent on Glenn Beck, the self-styled prophet and demagogue. Since I don’t have a TV and definitely no cable television, I’ve been pretty much immunized from Beck. Someday, though, I’ll give in and write about Glenn Beck and American religion—there is much of interest, however depressing it might be. But here’s a roundup of some good articles on Beck and religion.

• Andrew Murphy, “Beck Plays Prophet—Politics Pervade,” Religion Dispatches. Murphy is the author of a fine book on the history of the jeremiad, which I reviewed on Religion in America. In this article, Murphy compares Beck’s rhetoric to the jeremiad of Martin Luther King Jr.

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New York Times columnist Charles Blow included this chart in his latest op-ed. Countries further to the right are wealthier than those to the left, while countries higher up are more religious than those further down. In general the trend is that wealthier nations are less religious than poorer nations. A decent curve could be extrapolated except for the wealthiest nation included, the United States, which persists in its abnormal religiosity among developed nations.

With this post, Religion in America welcomes Jonathan Newell as an author. Jonathan holds a degree in history and a master’s of divinity, and he is a chaplain in the Army Reserves, as well as an extraordinarily prolific reviewer of books.

Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 280 pages. ISBN: 0060185163.

With the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version rapidly approaching, one can hear legions of scholars drawing their pens from their scabbards, ready to enter the fray over the Authorized Version. The growth of the King James Only movement over the past decades have hardened opinions among American Christians. Some see it as a fossil; others see it as having come down from heaven.

Though Nicholson does not speak directly to these modern controversies, both sides would benefit from a careful reading of Nicolson’s work. Though most histories of the English Bible are as dry as the manuscripts they describe, this work is full of verve and life. That is because Nicholson tells the story of the KJV by telling the stories of the translators. Using the scant biographical sources available, he presents compelling portraits of Puritans, Anglicans, and the monarch whose varying and often-conflicting motives produced what many consider to be the finest literary work in English.

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What is identity? What is a self? How has selfhood changed over time?

Those are the questions that Charles Taylor, a philosopher with a historical method, sets out to answer in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989). His book is an investigation of how the modern sense of what it means to be a person came into being through the influences of philosophers and popular thought. To that end, he first lays a philosophical foundation, then offers a history of selfhood that is somewhere between straightfoward intellectual history and a history of mentalités.

Taylor’s basic argument is that the concept of the self in linked to morality. Morality means not simply a set of claims about what one ought to do or not do to be moral; rather, it means what one ought to be or not be. Morality is related to the self by what Taylor calls a framework. How one thinks about oneself depends (1) on what one considers to be the Good and (2) how one relates to that Good. If this all sounds very philosophical, it is. But the insight is rather simple, though profound: you can only think of yourself as you think of yourself in relation to what is most important.

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I’ve been reading through Gordon Wood’s exemplary Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and noticed something interesting.

During the 1780s and 90s a political division grew between Federalists and anti-Federalists. The Federalist faction supported a strong central government that could act as a check on the democratic excesses of the state legislatures and proposed a standing army to defend that government from riots or revolution, a trenchant fear in the years after the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. The Federalists favored a Constitution that would delineate federal prerogatives.

The anti-Federalists adhered to a liberal tradition which pulled from 17th century Whig thought. These English Whigs believed that absolutist governments aggrandized themselves as the expense of the people. Thus the anti-Federalists feared a strong central government and initially opposed a Constitution that gave the federal government broadened powers.

What Wood does not emphasize, though, is another key difference between these two political factions. The anti-Federalists ascribed to a rosy understanding of human nature. As Wood notes (11-13), Read the rest of this entry »

Following up (sort of) on Lincoln’s post about the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero, check out Bruce Feiler’s commentary in today’s Huffington Post: “Obama a Muslim! Lincoln a Catholic! FDR a Jew! Why Americans Don’t Like Their President’s God.” Coming on the heels of a report from the Pew Forum that 1 in 5 Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, Feiler’s article points out that campaigns of religious intolerance have targeted U.S. presidents since the nation’s founding.

Here’s a taste:

Americans taking out their discrimination toward minority religions on the president of the United States is as American as apple pie; the custom has been going on as long as there has been a presidency. George Washington was the subject of widespread grumbling that he was a more loyal Mason than he was a Christian.

The entire debate about the “Ground Zero mosque” and the even-wider campaign against Islam in general that’s been waged across the United States this summer misses a larger point: These kinds of campaigns have been waged in the United States since our founding. . . .

But as reliably as Americans have adopted these views, they’ve also moved past them. In every case of religious discrimination in the United States, whether it was Methodists in the eighteenth century, Catholics in the nineteenth century, or Jews in the twentieth century, the once reviled and ostracized “outsider” religion in America eventually makes it into the inner circle.

And odds are the pattern will repeat itself with Muslims in the twenty-first century.

I find Feiler’s argument to be rather compelling, and his historical contextualization helpful. Thoughts and/or responses?

To read the entire article, click here.

HT: John Fea