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The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

By Sarah Posner

…ng of drift away from and even hostility toward the establishment by young American Jews, and New York Times columnists Roger Cohen and Thomas Friedman, whose critiques are laced with laments over the decline, in Israel, of the liberal Zionism they grew up with and still cherish. Beinart now writes for Israel’s leading left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, where this summer he has repeatedly questioned Operation Protective Edge, both morally and strateg…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…iod of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s. They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standardized package of ideas and practices such that, by the late 1…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…ut all of capitalism. There’s no question that Christian ideas have shaped American business practices, just as American business practices have influenced churches. Lumping the annual revenues of Walmart in with synagogue dues, donations to the Salvation Army, and Catholic hospitals seems like a stretch. And if you look at other corporations, and the criteria used to include them, the territory becomes even murkier. Take Trijicon, for example, ch…

A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…the more extreme. Among the less extreme consequences was that the rising number of conservative American Christians who identified as Orthodox started to soften opinions and change American rightwing perceptions of Russia. Arguably, what this influx of American evangelicals into American Orthodox churches did was create a bridge over which American evangelicals in Russia were able to cross. An alliance began to take root which shaped Russia and…

America, the Mythical: “Mother of Exiles” or Denier of Safe Haven?

By Ed Simon

…ian, but in many ways we have made the pilgrims themselves characters in a new faith. The New England settlers constitute both the Genesis and Exodus of the American scripture. The pilgrims are celebrated as the originators of the American ideal, embodying religious liberty, thrift, industriousness and individuality. Historical fact is secondary to mythical power. The Mayflower leader and first governor of the Plymouth Colony William Bradford, amo…

America, the Mythical: “Mother of Exiles” or Denier of Safe Haven?

By Ed Simon

…ian, but in many ways we have made the pilgrims themselves characters in a new faith. The New England settlers constitute both the Genesis and Exodus of the American scripture. The pilgrims are celebrated as the originators of the American ideal, embodying religious liberty, thrift, industriousness and individuality. Historical fact is secondary to mythical power. The Mayflower leader and first governor of the Plymouth Colony William Bradford, amo…

Trump’s Inaugural Address Gets an “F” in American Civil Religion

By Spencer Dew

…bility to transcendent value. Indeed, his nationalism may well represent a new American civil religion—an idolatry of empty proclamations reliant on divisions within the American people. In an inaugural address decrying “empty talk,” Trump eschewed detailed articulation of American values for vague proclamations of a new nationalist ethos. Thus, we are offered Orwellian statements like “We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny” and t…

Raising Children the Right Way

By Jeffrey Feldman

…Jeffersonian lesson about the privilege and responsibility of adulthood in American democracy. In Thomas Jefferson’s view, this balance was the essence of a new political system whereby each person would play a role not just as an individual in private life, but as “participators” in the public realm. The goal of Jefferson’s democratic system was not to quash the individual or subsume the family within some broader collective concept, but to orien…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood.” With every new number, the end recedes, an ever-lengthening ribbon in a universe that has found a way to hold it all. How can a finite universe house something infinite? It seems impossible. And yet, pi is there, in every sunrise and car tire, every planet and solar system. Are mundane objects the site of the earth’s encounter with infinity? As scientists plumb the universe, they find…

The Protestant Mainline Makes a (Literary) Comeback

By Gary Dorrien

…inly out there, as do religious studies sociologist Courtney Bender in The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination and religious historian Kathryn Lofton in Oprah: Gospel of an Icon. Religious historian Matthew S. Hedstrom, in The Rise of Liberal Religion, amplifies the cultural victory thesis by focusing on the liberal Protestant creation of a book-reading, middlebrow, Emersonian spiritual culture. And religious his…