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‘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

…ils, however, Kirk’s novel resonates with much of the current discourse of American religion. The flight of millennial and Zoomer exvangelicals out of churches, the embattled politics of American Christian nationalism, and evangelical attacks on LGBTQ+ rights provide a backdrop for this coming of age story. RD spoke recently with Kirk, a senior editor at The Athletic and co-creator of several popular podcasts, about the book, Christian Nationalism…

The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

By Sarah Posner

…nment officials. “That’s a driving force to the center and the left” among American Jews, he said. The polarization of American Jews, said Dov Waxman, Professor of Political Science, International Affairs, and Israel Studies at Northeastern University, has increased with each large-scale eruption of fighting between Israel and Palestinians. Since the Second Intifada, which started in 2000, he said, with each escalation—Operation Cast Lead in 2009,…

The “Nones” Are Here… And Have Been for Over 100 Years

By Emily Mace

…ter of fact, actually do you?” Wouldn’t it be better to attend any kind of service—even one as secular as theirs—to increase the chances of having that kind of uplift? Adler’s implied question raises a point still relevant to unaffiliated Americans of today: does a life without religious institutions offer the same benefits as one lived in the context of a religious tradition? Another Ethical Culture leader, Percival Chubb of the Ethical Society o…

Illinois Bishop Greets Marriage Equality with Exorcism

By Peter Montgomery

…f God and sift them like wheat,” he continued. In an unusual use of public services, the exorcism included two armed Springfield police officers stationed inside the church vestibule where parishioners entered from the street. At one point during the service, one of the officers strode to the front of the church, though his purpose was unclear. There were no disruptions during the hourlong event. “Be gone Satan, father of lies, enemy of human salv…

Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…life growing up, others from e-mail. He hears more stories after a worship service, where as many as 1,000 visitors are invited to meet him. I apparently missed the seminary class that taught pastors not to get “sidetracked in controversy.” Instead, my classes taught me that it was theologian Karl Barth that counseled pastors to use both the Bible and the newspaper in their preaching, but Osteen will have none of that. Anything that might get in t…

As Transition Looms, Jewish Studies is Mired in Controversy

By Shaul Magid

…posite. They claim that “historical and critical theory have much to offer American Jewish sociology and American Jewish Studies.” The question is: what tools will be deployed to best navigate that engagement, making explicit what’s at stake and bringing a critical eye to the normative claims embedded in our habits and language? *** One of the questions that has consistently plagued Jewish Studies in the academy is where it belongs. Two possibilit…

Google’s Benevolent Interfaith Big Tent

By Lucia Hulsether

…roffer a salve of consumption; it forms a multicultural public through its online search platform, one that is so prophetically omniscient that it can anticipate its users’ needs. With the Google ad, we have a new kind of pastoral guide—one who is less concerned about what we buy, and more concerned about how we physically move through the world according to its irresistible—but oh-so-welcome—pull. For example, Google anticipates the granddaughter…

Coming Out on a Christian Campus, Then and Now

By Ed Madden

…a boy—that dunk in the cold baptistery during a gospel revival was more a flight from hell and from my growing sense of sexual difference than a spiritual conviction. After taking the bread and wine that Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church in Austin’s Hyde Park, I couldn’t get up. I knelt at the altar rail and wept, shaking, still not believing in a God or a community that would accept me just as I am, rather than just how others wanted and…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, as I waited to board a flight back home to Oslo. I was there on Aug. 14, 2016, when, after years of the “War on Terror,” one of North America’s most important international airports seized up as panicked reports of “multiple active shooters”—later discredited as false—swept through the terminals, sending passengers, law-enforcement, and airline workers scrambling for cover and eventually onto the…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…way that no band ever has. Their music ventured to the outer limits of the American musical canon, seamlessly fusing uniquely American musical genres into something entirely new. In memorializing Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan lauded his friend’s virtuosity in American music: “There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any sc…