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Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

By Eric C. Miller

…xas public school watchdog Norma Gabler became a fixture at the annual textbook adoption hearings in Austin, claiming moral authority as a mother to revise curricula according to conservative beliefs. Stories of these and other women fill the book, suggesting that family values made the personal political for conservative women. They understood feminism as a misrepresentation of their hopes and values, and they rallied against feminist objectives…

Catholic Citizenship: Massimo Faggioli on the Role of Public Theologians Today

By Kaya Oakes

…erica from Italy in 2007, and, he says, “this is the most American” of his books. A rigorously scholarly book that’s nonetheless accessible to non-academics, Faggioli’s book examines the impact of Vatican II both on clergy and lay people. Faggioli says that many American Catholics “share part of the responsibility” for the “democratic crisis” in Catholicism, “because they have forgotten and neglected an important part of the Vatican II message.” H…

Talking Religion at 30,000 Feet

By Michael J. Altman

…ourist in seat 17B what I really think? I recently happened up on a little book that answered that question for me. In his new history of the origins of the field, Religion Enters the Academy (a little three-chapter book perfect for plane rides), James Turner narrates the rise of comparative religion in America from the late eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. In Turner’s story, the earliest scholars of world religions did not actuall…

How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck

By Joanna Brooks

…es from the Heart and the Heartland, later started pitching Skousen’s 1981 book The 5,000 Year Leap on air in December, 2008. He wrote a preface for a new edition of the book issued a few months later and in his March 2009 kick-off of the 9/12 movement declared Skousen’s book to be “divinely inspired.” In a recent article for Salon.com, Alexander Zaitchik suggested that Beck “rescued [Skousen] from the remainder pile of history.” But Cleon Skousen…

‘Iconoclash’ of Civilizations: Missives from the Image Wars

By Eric M. Gurevitch

…essed in nicely ironed Old World clothing, smiling in the sun, posing with books. A note attached to the photograph reads: These young refugee children learn that books aren’t burned in America. The Picture was taken at the New York World’s Fair following a ceremony for refugees in the Temple of Religion. The Fair which will reopen May 11th has chosen Peace and Freedom as its theme in 1940. *** Also at the 1939 World’s Fair, right across the parad…

‘Hell is a World Without You’ Shows Readers How Squarely They Would Have Been on Path to Jan 6 if They’d Come of Age in Evangelicalism

By Michael J. Altman

…me. But I did wonder how well those normie readers would make sense of the book. One evening, I happened to mention Carman (the Christian musician and evangelist who gets a few references in the book) to my partner, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I took her on a YouTube rabbit hole of Carman videos, which she found horrifying. What have you heard from readers who didn’t have firsthand experience? I treated it like a sci-fi story. Wi…

New Book Reveals How Faith is Like a Covert Operation for the Bush Family

By Frederick Clarkson

…as the story that speechwriter Karen Hughes wove into Bush’s 1999 campaign book, A Charge to Keep. There was no mention of Blessitt. Baker writes from the standpoint of a journalist, looking into the murky career and political and financial empire of one of America’s leading political dynasties. George H.W. Bush’s career in the CIA, capped by his brief tenure as director under Ford, reveals a politician comfortable with the workings of covert oper…

Noise in the Hood: Raising the Volume and Losing Our Bodies

By Peter Laarman

…ut I have not encountered any anecdotes of rabbis teaching Talmud with megaphones. A religion of microphones and loudspeakers is a religion of leaders and followers, which is not the same thing as a religion of teachers and disciples. The goal of the latter is to raise the disciple to the level of the teacher; the goal of the former is to keep the followers ‘informed,’ and in formation. For this reader, however, every dimension of this trenchant b…

The Forgotten History of Black Calvinism and the Haunting of American Folk Music

By Joshua Guthman

…in the river, the typography: all of these elements masterfully evoke the book’s title. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? Do As I Lay Dying and The Transit of Venus count? If it’s histories we’re talking about, then anything by John Demos and almost anything by Edmund Morgan, Carlo Ginzburg, and Lyndal Roper. What’s your next book? It’s a story. Or really a series of linked stories. Each is a microhistory of a ki…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…at Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent. The cover of Hargis’ 1964 book, The Far Left, showed a weeping Statue of Liberty, dripping with blood, speared by a sword with a hammer and sickle handle. The purpose of the book, Hargis wrote in the introduction, was to expose not just communists, but also “those organizations and men who have aided and abetted the cause of Communism by word or deed, whether intentionally or unintentionally.” The “…