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How AIDS Changed the Way American Christians Talk About Sex

By Anthony Petro

…history of American Christianity and medicine is less a story of religious decline than one of transformation. The cases I discuss reveal ongoing negotiations between secular and religious forms of knowledge about bodies and about health that have advanced new understandings of personhood, moral citizenship, and Americans’ relationship to the politics of health. At its broadest reach, my research asks how “health,” including public health, has be…

Obama Criticizes Black Fatherhood

By Jonathan L. Walton

…with such criticisms does not seek to dismiss or deny the problems African Americans need to confront. The American cultural ills of perverted masculinity and family breakdown—which are particularly acute in poor black neighborhoods—must be a part of our spiritual and political agendas for social renewal. I do question, however, why it is that the black church seems so obsessed with negatively critiquing the deviance of some, while invariably igno…

How Men’s Rights Activists Are Finding Unlikely Allies in New Atheism: #MeToo, the Manosphere, and the “Church of Feminism”

By Caroline Matas

…al.” For the Manosphere, the enemy is the hopelessly irrational woman. For New Atheism, the enemy is irrationality itself. But as the two groups’ memberships and rhetoric coalesce, New Atheism increasingly ends up firing at the same targets as blatant misogynists. As #MeToo continues to promote conversations about gender dynamics and rights, New Atheists might find that it’s time to be clear about their ideological commitments—or else have those c…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…ot all of them, suggest that there are really no differences between white Americans and African Americans in terms of things like church attendance, religiosity, prayer. And yet when you look at the occasional major study of African Americans, with a large number of respondents and some white Americans for comparison purposes, the evidence suggests that African Americans are much more religious on average than white Americans in terms of how many…

This Year’s Best Books in African American Religion

By Jonathan L. Walton

…or graduate students. 3. Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949, University of California Press, June, 2007 History and cultural studies at its best! Judith Weisenfeld’s engagement of race films during the interwar era sheds light upon the way the film industry represented, participated in, and shaped the many discourses taking place around religion, race, gender and class in America. This b…

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

By Andrew Aghapour

…ious beliefs. You also find symmetry between fundamentalist Christians and New Atheists: both think that truth claims need to be taken very seriously. How do you respond to the accusation that there is a fundamentalism to New Atheism, where science is often treated as an absolutist metaphysics? Well, absolutism is almost always a mild term of abuse. Nobody champions absolutism. Whenever anybody is called an absolutist it’s usually meant in critici…

Don’t Be Tooken In by Kimmy Schmidt‘s Cult

By Megan Goodwin

…the fact that it yielded little substantive evidence of abuse.) Throughout American history, new religions have pushed gender boundaries. Many facilitated women’s leadership and authority, as seen in figures like the Shakers’ Mother Ann Lee or Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy. New religious movements can prompt reconsideration of divine gender, as with contemporary Goddess worship. They can challenge traditional gender roles, identities, and pe…

Christians of Color Are Rejecting “Colonial Christianity” and Reclaiming Ancestral Spiritualities

By Deborah Jian Lee

…State University, describes the hybridized practices adopted by some Asian Americans. He sees how Vietnamese Americans create home shrines that blend the traditional—a single photo of an ancestor beside assorted fruits—with a touch of “Americanization,” such as adding significant ornaments or a photo montage that personalizes the shrine. Meanwhile, second generation Korean American churches practice a distinct form of simultaneous spoken prayer, w…

How a Bill O’Reilly Bestseller Helps Explain the Anti-Semitism Behind the Poway Shooting

By Tony Keddie

…church, the shooter’s rant reproduces anti-Semitic interpretations of the New Testament that are widespread among American conservatives. Take, for example, the best-selling book on Jesus in recent years, Killing Jesus: A History by disgraced Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly and sports writer Martin Dugard, both Roman Catholics. When the book was first published in 2013, the New Testament scholar Candida Moss adeptly critiqued its “historical” metho…

The Visceral Vote: Obama-as-Sojourner v. McCain-as-Mythic-Hero

By Ira Chernus

…political benefit from attacking cultural symbols of “the sixties.” Every new round brings new symbolic issues, however. In 2004, much media attention was focused on social issues like abortion and gay rights. In fact, though, more careful post-election studies found that the key to Bush’s success was the voters’ fear of terrorism. Yet for the many churchgoers who voted Republican because they were still seeking the spirituality of dwelling, the…