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Robert Bellah’s Powerful Legacy: A Mixed Blessing for Religious Studies?

By Ivan Strenski

…e flagship campuses of the University of California system at Berkeley and Los Angeles. Let me begin with a grateful appreciation for both Bellah the scholar and the man. I admired the way Bellah deviated from mainline social research, because much of what Bellah did, especially in the early decades of his career, gave my field a deeper, more rounded presence in the university. Many of us in religious studies, who did comparative studies, were del…

In Trump Era, Young Muslims Question Respectability Politics of Mosques

By Hebah H. Farrag

…ligious creativity, the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture has seen Los Angeles’ young Muslims create “third spaces” such as the Ehsan Center and the Women’s Mosque of America—spaces that operate outside the norm of what a traditional mosque looks like. Across the country, I have talked to young American Muslims who are disaffiliating entirely from formal institutions and participating in community-building in new ways. In the course of thi…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…wish” in there, and you’ve got world-zionist-conspiracy antisemitism, circa 1880-1945. So in a way, the couple of bigots at Zuccotti Park are just connecting the dots between Occupy’s agenda and their own. The main difference, of course, is that Occupy’s target is real, whereas the antisemite’s is a fantasy. Which is a pretty big difference. All this would be insignificant were it not for the significant financial backing of ECI, and its associati…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…ed States, it contributes to the “truth telling” element of a planned truth-and-reconciliation process on gender and sexual abuse in Episcopal spaces. And the truth is horrifying. Of the more than 2400 responses collected, 475 (20%) are from cisgender LGB Episcopalians. Nearly 40% of these—189 individuals—reported being the targets of inappropriate jokes and comments; 29.9%—82 individuals—of inappropriate touching; and a further 14.9%—71 individua…

A Devil’s Dozen of the Best ‘New Religion Journalism’ Books of the Decade

By Ed Simon

…the United States the vast majority of our medical resources go towards end-of-life care, using medicine, the law, philosophy, ethics, and religion as lenses through which she helps her reader understand difficult questions about what death is, how death should happen, and how death shouldn’t. The Good Death has as a central sentiment that “Because of medical developments, we’ve gotten away from caring for our dying, from seeing death up close… [s…

The Christian Roots of the New Age: The Aquarian Gospel

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…y and the harrowing story of Herod’s attempt to murder this newborn messiah-to-be. Luke adds a few poignant tales from Jesus’ childhood, most notably the Christmas story with the shepherds, and the story of a precocious twelve year old arguing circles around the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem (Dowling likes that one, naturally, and expands on it in chapter 19 of The Aquarian Gospel). John sets the whole thing in a cosmic framework, telling us firs…

Sacred Geography: A Queer Latino Theological Response to Orlando

By Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez

…supposedly en route to the Pride event in West Hollywood. As I watched the Los Angeles SWAT team and armored vehicles cruising up and down the LA Pride parade route a couple hours later, my heart broke and my body ached. I walked along the route and saw the same anti-gay protestors who show up every year. Yesterday, they were behind two sets of barriers with a squad of SWAT officers next to them. And as I stood across from them, listening to their…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…the popularity of these tabloids can be directly attributed to their tongue-in-cheek entertainment value. Touched by an angel — every Sunday At the beginning of the period of prestige TV known as the “Third Golden Age of Television,” when David Lynch was directing Twin Peaks and David Chase was just launching The Sopranos, one of the most popular shows—albeit incredibly distant from being critically acclaimed—was a hokey, family friendly fantasy…

Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain

…died at the age of 96 while living in seclusion at a Fellowship convent in Los Angeles. I suggest that we use this event in the history of yoga in the United States as an opportunity to question and perhaps destabilize some of our ideas about what American yoga is and what it means to Americans today. Although we tend to associate yoga’s entrance into the United States with the counterculture of the 1960s and especially the Beatles, gurus from Ind…

The ‘Fake Christian’ Deflection and Contrarian Concern Trolling: How Not to Write about Evangelical Authoritarianism

By Chrissy Stroop

…his anecdotal observations that, regardless of their size, “a focus on one-on-one ministry and a commitment to local communities” are what have helped churches weather the pandemic. However, Hinch fails to shore up his larger argument when he points to the famous Saddleback megachurch’s model of using “small fellowship groups” to “provide the kind of personal contact and accountability otherwise lacking in large, anonymous megachurch services” as…