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Category Archives: Religion
Harvey Cox: The Theologian Who Bet on the City
In the summer of 1963, Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. (b. 1929) sat in a jail cell in Williamston, North Carolina. He had come south with clergy supporting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to demonstrate against segregation, and the local authorities … Continue reading
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David Morgan: The Man Who Took Cheap Pictures of Jesus Seriously
During the Second World War, a printing press at Chicago Offset Printing Company ran two shifts a day producing a single image: Warner Sallman‘s Head of Christ. The 1940 painting showed Jesus in three-quarter profile against a dark ground, hair … Continue reading
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Mark Juergensmeyer: The Man Who Interviewed the Holy Warriors
On September 30, 1997, a professor from Santa Barbara sat in a visiting room at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California, across from a tall Egyptian with freckles and red hair. The other inmates called the prisoner Mahmud the Red. … Continue reading
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The Unsaying of Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong (b. November 14, 1944) has done more than any living writer to teach general readers how religions work. She holds no university chair. She commands no seminar room, supervises no doctoral students, and publishes in no peer-reviewed journals. … Continue reading
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Religion Scholar Russell McCutcheon
Russell McCutcheon (b. 1961) grew up inside a gas station on the north shore of Lake Erie. His parents owned it and worked it, and the family lived right there on the lot in Port Colborne, Ontario, close enough to … Continue reading
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Jonathan Zittell Smith: The Grass Breeder Who Remade the Study of Religion
He wanted to breed grass. Not religion. Grass. At sixteen he spent a summer on a farm, part of a program Cornell ran for city boys who thought they might want to work the land. The school made him prove … Continue reading
Religion in Secular Society
Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Secular Society, originally published in 1966 and reissued with Steve Bruce’s commentary in 2016, notes that when science developed as a specialized profession and gained social prestige through demonstrable practical results, the clergyman was left as … Continue reading
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The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle Between Gay Rights and Religious Rights in America
The conflict between gay rights and religious rights in America is a jurisdictional struggle over which moral language sets the default for law and public life. No one stands up and says they are competing for institutional control. They say … Continue reading
Posted in America, Freedom, Homosexuality, Religion
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Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America
ChatGPT says: This book’s central argument (as described in summaries and reviews) is that religion declines when its functional alliances with the social order weaken — not because people get “smarter,” but because religion’s structural role in holding societies together … Continue reading
Religion As Ethnic Marker
Simon Kuper writes in the FT: “As people embrace tech-tinged or personalised religions (or none at all), old communal religions don’t disappear. Rather, they are being repurposed from faiths into markers of ethnic identity. This is a global trend. Roy … Continue reading
Posted in Nationalism, Religion
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