I invite younger readers to take a look [at my book, Building a Protestant Left] and see if there is anything there for them. Few of the issues that C&C addressed have gone away. Nor have people in left Christian traditions disappeared. (Yes, they are a minority, but we often underestimate how much that has always been true). We can learn from their experience in the current moment.

It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases.

Hardwired into religious traditions, as part of longstanding sensibilities, are teachings about justice, care for the weak, and attention to the common good: teachings that command nontrivial respect in the public sphere.... Common sense plus the moral legacies of our religious traditions add up to a combined weight that is not trivial. We may not be able to fight a riptide, but if we can fund a war, then surely we can fund a school.

[Last October, I posted a rush article entitled "Fragments Related to Christian Nationalism" (CN). It included a promise to revise and...

Although A Complete Unknown is not a great film, without limitations worth noting, it is more than solid. Its high points are outstanding, and it is excellent for sparking thought about major issues. You should definitely watch A Complete Unknown if you haven’t thought about Bob Dylan lately and/or you care about how music relates to cultural critique. However, I will suggest that the film should be more a starting point for reflection than an end point.

What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health care as an issue in US politics. But primarily it is episode 10,255 in my ongoing screed against garbage in garbage out polls and shitty media spin generated from them. My longstanding dissatisfaction with polling about US religion (for example here) led me to this place—triggering and informing what I will say—but that aspect of the proble

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories that make me feel better about myself. Recently there was one about “Dad bods”—a term for bodies that are reasonably fit but not fully optimal in the way of body fat percentages, six-pack abs, and a lack of any evidence of drinking a beer now and then. My own Dad bod has decent aerobic and core strength for my age, but it definitely only

For the New Year, let’s recall two milestones on the Christian Right from the past year. One of the key architects of that movement, Pat...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...

If you followed me on the wordpress site where I started blogging in 2017, perhaps you've clicked over to this site by now. Or perhaps...

I wrote this history of transformations in the academic study of religion at the University of Tennessee: both macro changes in the...

In the first and second sections of this three-part post—introduced here and expanded from an article in the Encyclopedia of American...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five. Here is a picture. I have limited memories from these years, and most of these are filtered through home movies that I watched later or stories my father told me about his first job there as a Lutheran minister. But I have a strong impression that the town, named Williams, was intact and reasonably thriving—not unlike a nearby town named Kanawha wh

I've built up several cheesy but memorable “mottos” for the academic study of religion, to use in teaching. The focus today is “this...

NOTE ON A NEW VERSION, NOVEMBER 2026: Although an earlier version of this now-much-revised article appeared in 2019 during a debate about Donald Trump's first impeachment, and at that time it called back to related debates in 2008, it has continuing relevance. Today I return to it in the context of the 2026 midterms which tend to support my long-running argument. Much has changed in the evangelical world since 2008, but there is significant continuity too. For today's occasi

…Or… if you want to watch, or already did—if you are into that sort of thing—let’s compare notes. The production was fascinating in...

There isn’t much point in sending readers of this little blog to Reading Religion , the American Academy of Religion’s review portal—I...

In few days I head to my summer writing place, a log cabin in the Wisconsin north woods where my mom grew up. It's about halfway between...

In both classes I am teaching this term, I heard matter-of-fact comments about how end-times theologies correlate with “fatalism”—which...

My previous post explained why "refereed publications"—those vetted by expert academic gatekeepers—do not reliably signal scholarly value, nor “non-refereed” publications a lack of quality—despite the deep structural bias in academia toward assuming that they do....I did not expect instant slam dunk support in the New York Times, but last weekend the Times featured this story with the clickbait “dog park sex” in its title.