Religion and Politics

Fighting Over God’s Image

In The New York Times, Edward Blum and Paul Harvey write an op-ed based on research from their new book The Color of Christ. They explore the “confusion” of many Americans over the recent outrage in the Middle East over negative depictions of Mohammed. Blum and Harvey find, “The confusion stems, in part, from the ubiquity of sacred images in American culture.” However, they note that this assimilation of divine depictions into U.S. culture was a slow process: “Our ability to sustain a culture supersaturated with visual displays of the divine, largely without violence, came only after massive technological change, centuries of immigration and social movements that forced Americans to reckon with differences of race, ethnicity and religion.”

Read at The New York Times

• Email
• Print