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.

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...

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

In the first section of this three-part post—introduced here and based on my article in the Encyclopedia of American Religion—I broached...

I am so old that I can remember when people used hard copies of encyclopedias! I read the World Book Encyclopedia as a kid, and later I...

As discussed in this introductory post, MBE is republishing a piece I wrote for the Encyclopedia of American Religions about the academic...

Like all too many aspects of polling about religions and secularisms, the discourse about "spiritual" is largely broken. It registers...

I suppose I’m less and less unique all the time, but I have personal friends who have been touched directly by a mass murder, perpetrated...

Recently I visited a UT class that was discussing Judith Butler. It provoked the perennial complaints about Butler’s prose—leading toward...

NOTE: I've tagged this for "oldies but goodies," partly because it's a follow-up to my piece on Chris Hedges referenced below, and...

I published this at Sacred Matters a few weeks ago, and I want to see how it looks here.  Click on the picture to access it. Meanwhile I...