arts and culture on America

O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From ...

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood - the virtues that made America.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

It’s a cultural disability in America that we worship pleasure, leisure, and affluence. I think the church is doubly damned when they use Jesus as a vehicle for achieving all of that. Like, if you giv...

I know most Americans today do not worship Baal, but when I look at the church in America, I fear that we have our own Baals that demand our worship. I see so many people bowing down before prosperity...

We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture…. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man’s de...

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

In his seminal work, the Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois describes the unique challenge to identity one faces being both Black and American. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-conscious...

When mainstream America makes an example of Paula Deen, it both turns her into a scapegoat and also creatively claims its own innocence, because it limits the definition of racism to individual acts.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

The problem was that . . . Christian values were always more popular in American culture than the Christian gospel. That’s why one could speak of “God and country” with great reception in almost any e...

We must face the sad fact that at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing.... we stand in the most segregated hour of America.

American history books contain stories of women who changed society with their hard work and insistence on justice. The women of the suffrage movement clad in white, those active in the temperance mov...

The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics. Church and state are specific things: the former signifies institutions for believers to congregate ...

Many of us struggle to know exactly what to pack when we go on our various travels. The Pilgrims in their voyage to the new world were no different. As Bill Bryson describes in his book Made in Americ...

Religion has always been woven into American politics. John Quincy Adams liked to read the Bible in the mornings and would plunge naked into the Potomac for a swim before attending his weekly Sunday c...

In his thought-provoking book, Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive, Jonathan Walton uncovers some of the hard truths about American culture. In this excerpt, he describes the consumption associa...

Rest has never been one of America’s greatest strengths. According to one study, only one in seven adults (14%) have set aside an entire day for the purpose of rest. For those who do set aside an enti...

ALL SINGING: (America the Beautiful, first verse) O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grac...

In America, we consume twice as many material goods as we did fifty years ago. Over the same period, the size of the average American home has nearly tripled, and today that average home contains abou...

While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...

The following article was originally written for the author’s denominational newsletter as part of the celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. It is meant to provide some insights into t...

Even more germane to the concerns of this book, it is important to remember how the American concern for enumerating Christian work can look to non-Americans. Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) was a Japanese...

In the fall of 1986, just out of college, I set out to hitchhike across the northwestern part of the United States. I’d hardly ever been west of the Hudson River, and in my mind what waited for me out...

Americans, given the choice between civilizing their cities thorugh public works, and using the car to escape the demands of civility, chose the car.

Contrary to popular opinion, the church is not dying in America; it is alive and well, but it is alive and well among the immigrant and ethnic minority communities and not among the majority white chu...

I grew up near Washington D.C. surrounded by politics…I helped with the campaign of a friend’s father as he ran for state office, watched our friendly county supervisor become a US congressman, and le...

When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the past sixty centuries or the last sixty years.