tennessee

Unbuckling the Bible Belt: “Nashville” and the Nones

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The choices and consequences on “Nashville”—ABC’s popular drama, returning on January 15—are shaped not by evangelical faith, but by redemptive crusades to achieve an awkward, messy, and ambiguous sense of moral and musical purity. By exchanging the role of traditional southern Christianity for postmodern Bible Belt spirituality, the show brings the South into conformity with the shifting demographics of the rest of the country.

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Public Religion in a Post-Christian Age, Graduation Edition

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What kind of profundity is acceptable in our pluralistic public space? Can a public high school organize a graduation service that appeals to religious themes? Can a religiously diverse private college invite a commencement speaker representing only one of the many religious traditions represented in the room? Or, given religious diversity, should schools try to maintain an air of resolute non-religiosity?

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