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A Pastor’s Suicide: Addressing Mental Health in Black Churches

By Darnell Moore

…subsequent presence in Christ. I was not alone in such skewed thinking. Spirited Sunday morning worship services at the church I attended in southern New Jersey were almost always animated by the types of behaviors that most people associate with neo-Pentecostal, holiness, or some Baptist churches: vivacious hand clapping, foot-stomping, ecstatic exhalations, dancing, and tongue-speaking when the spirit was really high. One particular Sunday,…

Sikh Prof. Prabhjot Singh Was Not The ‘Victim’ of a Hate Crime

By Simran Jeet Singh

…ral passage, is likewise illustrated in the following account. In the early 18th century, Sikhs became targets of state-sanctioned persecution. The ruling elite in Punjab offered a reward for every Sikh captured, dead or alive, and official policies barred Sikhs from congregating in public settings. In the 1730s Bhai Mani Singh (1737 CE), a prominent Sikh leader, petitioned Governor Zakariya Khan for permission to gather in the historic city of Am…

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

By Ivan Strenski

…national ideal “which would lead to a revitalization of the revolutionary spirit of the young republic, so that Americans would once again attract the hope and love of its citizens”? Bellah is invested, even piously so, in American civil religion, and feels called to rally us in its behalf. Habits of the Heart simply intensifies the image of Bellah’s pastoral concern for the moral health of the republic, threatened as it is by impoverishing indiv…

How Robert Bellah (1927-2013) Changed the Study of Religion

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…gion in China, Japan, Islamic societies, and the United States published in 1970 in his book of essays, Beyond Belief, illustrates that point. In his 1967 essay in Daedalus on “Civil Religion,” Bellah founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones. In this case it was Emile Durkheim that Bellah evoked, taking up Durkheim’s notion…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…nberg’s discussion of the Renaissance—in his definition, the period between 1400 and 1600. But this discussion has little to do with the supposed rebirth of Western culture. Nirenberg highlights the ironic contradictions between the scarcity of Jews in Western Europe and the frequent allegations of Judaizing. Martin Luther accused his Papist opponents of “legalism,” “Pharisaism,” and of course, “Judaism”; the Papists, in turn, accused Luther of ge…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…wing same-sex couples to get married would unleash “sexual insanity” and a spirit “more demonic than Islam.” Williams does not delve deeply into IHOP’s dominionist worldview, but IHOP officials tell him about the ambitious goals they have for their 1,000-person staff: a vision of one million new Christian soldiers who will win one billion souls—and raising one trillion dollars to make it happen. They tell young followers, “You’re going to take ove…

What’s a Faith-Healing Congregation to Do When Measles Hits?

By Rob Shryock

…God praise for that. When George Pearsons says that they “commanded” the “spirit of measles” to leave, he’s not being figurative. Pearsons believes that you can be cured of almost any ailment by a ritual recitation of God’s word. He claimed in Sunday’s sermon that people could, “take authority over their bodies” by using “words of dominion,” saying that, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” In context, Pearsons’s sermon comes off as…

Rethinking Religion After Latest Holistic Death

By Joseph Laycock

…mulate the experience of birth. The therapists received prison sentences of 16 years. In 2009, two people died in a poorly constructed homemade sweat lodge during a five-day “Spiritual Warrior” retreat organized by James Arthur Ray, a self-help expert who appeared on Oprah and in the film The Secret. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation consulted Dianne Casoni, a criminologist from the University of Montreal who studies “cultic groups,” including…

Occupy’s Sacred Mob and the Politics of Vagrancy

By Vincent Gonzalez

…e—is beginning for this broken-down, halfway collapsing, senile society: a spirit of examination.” In this lecture Caillois asserts that rapid changes in the notion of “the individual” (perhaps like those facilitated by capitalist globalization and ubiquitous social media) will produce a social “climate” through which only new forms of organic solidarity will survive. Furthermore, what the College did, drawing from biblical and ethnographic data o…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ornia, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized practices such as yoga, meditation, reiki, and past-life regression, and the success of Esalen encouraged invited the development of retreat centers of myriad spiritual and traditional religious varieties across the country. As such, Esalen has played a central role in the vast commercializing of American s…