What follows has more information, in a tighter package, than you’ll hear about Lutherans in many US religion overviews--so let's shoehorn it into my "1000 words or less" series although it slightly overshoots. Knowing more about Lutherans could matter in various ways, including that if you care about Midwestern swing voters or why Minneapolis mobilized against ICE, it might help you.

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

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...

Sometimes humor only works in distinctive niches with particular background presuppositions. Whether it will land in this case, I'm not...

This post is cross-published here on Narrative Paths Journal I fielded a query from a University of Tennessee campus newspaper about...

Imagine that a shark has a fish literally inside its jaws, but cannot bite down. Prayer is like that. It is like a “toxin” that makes you...

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...

What do we remember? How do we remember? What good does it do? I started writing this post while the media was hyping the 50th...

I just published an article in the American Studies journal, Quarterly Horse, which features concise scholarly interventions. Here it is...

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

Earlier I discussed a reporter who asked for abut a sound-bite about “religion” in the south— and how this led to “True and Useful...

Before I began my previous post, I imagined an introduction to set up a lightly edited version of some notes I prepared for a reporter....

The flagship institution of politically righteous left-wing Protestants is building luxury condominiums on the Upper West Side of Manhattan! It sounds like a bad joke—or at least a perfect opening for haters to recycle their repertoire of insults. On top of this they are working on the construction just outside my window. Literally, workers have been walking around on scaffolding four feet from my bed, waking me up. How can I be defending them?