“Spirituality”: Why Pundit Common Wisdom About It Is Largely Broken
Ryan Burge, a sociologist who garners attention as a pundit on US religion, recently published an essay on Substack about a poll on...
May 28, 202412 min read
A Brief History of the Study of Religion at the University of Tennessee
I wrote this history of transformations in the academic study of religion at the University of Tennessee: both macro changes in the...
Feb 9, 202113 min read
III. Pros, Cons, and Whiplash: Studying US Religions from a Base in Religious Studies
In the first and second sections of this three-part post—introduced here and expanded from an article in the Encyclopedia of American...
Oct 21, 202016 min read
The Death of My Old Hometown: Sucking Out the Wealth, Filling the Gap with Fecal Pollution
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
Apr 21, 20206 min read
The Melting of a Glacier Matters Even If It's Still Very Cold: Evangelicals and Trump
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
Jan 2, 202012 min read