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Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…so I discovered that the sociological data suggested that the majority of Americans believe in ghosts or demons. Indeed, a surprising 73% of Americans have at least one paranormal belief, and while the data is less robust it looks like there are similar belief patterns in Western Europe. At the very least, it seems hard to argue that the “modern West” is straightforwardly disenchanted. So I asked myself how did we get the notion that “modernity”…

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…to date was HPA for the Win in June 2010, during which HPA mobilized huge numbers of online voters from across fandoms and online communities to win a $250,000 grant from the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Then there’s the current “Deathly Hallows” campaign, which centers on the release date of a Harry Potter movie—in this case, The Deathly Hallows: Part 1 on Nov. 19. The Deathly Hallows campaign will run for nine months—the time bet…

The Demographic that Should Keep Rove Awake at Night

By Katherine Stewart

…ation. That said, lack of religious affiliation is also common among Asian Americans: while 42 percent of Asian Americans identify as Christian, 26 percent report themselves as religiously unaffiliated, in a significant increase over the general population, and 73 percent of Asian Americans voted for Obama. Like any group of this size, the religiously unaffiliated aren’t monolithic. About a third self-identify as atheists, while the rest say they…

“Can You Tell Me Who The Villains Are?”: Rock and Religion, Irish-Style

By Lisa Bitel

…boys. In all, the Saw Doctors have produced seven studio albums and thirty number one singles. Music critics have compared the band’s effect to that of the Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen because of their ability to make the small negotiations and crises of everyday life seem so politically urgent, and to do so in catchy melodies and upbeat rhythms. But the real secret to Docs’ success lies in their devoted cult following among Irish, British,…

Post-Election, “Is The Black Church Dead?” Redux

By Anthea Butler

…s mobilization, voter apathy, and a growing number of conservative African-American candidates. A record number of black Republicans ran in this midterm election (some had already lost their primaries), and two are heading to Congress. Tim Scott will be the first African-American Republican to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction. (He beat out Strom Thurmond’s son in the primaries.) Iraq war veteran Allen West will be headed t…

The Catholic-Evangelical (Non-)Coalition

By Patricia Miller

…ole.” A 2009 Gallup Poll found “almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics” in terms of the moral acceptability of abortion, with 40% of Catholics saying it was morally acceptable versus 41% of all Americans.” A 2013 Pew Poll found that just over half (53%) of white Catholics said that having an abortion was morally wrong, which was slightly higher than general opinion (49%), while three-quarters of wh…

The Catholic Apocalypse Cometh

By Patricia Miller

…re was the usual riff that Obamacare was “socialized medicine,” a stunning number of the comments groused about the birth control mandate. There’s significant evidence from earlier Pew Foundation polling that the Catholic bishops’ opposition to the contraceptive mandate and the subsequent war on “religious liberty” they ginned up was a major factor in alienating white Catholics from the Democratic Party. The number of white Catholics who said the…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…to death were sheltered in a cave in New Haven. Not surprising then, that American revolutionary and future president John Adams was called “John the Roundhead” as a young lawyer. Much later, in 1786, Adams made a special pilgrimage to key English Civil War battlefields, referring to them as “holy ground.” Looking back at the American Revolution during that same period, Adams recalled that “if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Chu…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…hristian, just like Tony Perkins. Mr. Perkins, you don’t speak for me or a number of conservative evangelicals who are worn out and sickened by the same old battle cry you believe we should join. Many ask today, why should we join one side and fight against the other? Each time it’s the same banal response: For no other reason than that we should just fall in line against what extreme public figures deem a societal evil worthy to be fought against…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…mer industrial cities with once sizable populations of blue-collar African-American laborers were among the cities hit hardest by massive downturns in resources, as businesses and corporations relocated to better markets in the suburbs or overseas and as middle-class populations fled urban core neighborhoods for outer-ring or suburban locales. Both of these dynamics contributed to vastly diminished property values, tax revenues, and local urban ec…