The Politicization of Evangelical Surfer Bethany Hamilton

June 26, 2024 By Andrea L. Turpin

I am delighted to share this summer-themed guest post on religion and celebrity in the career of an evangelical surfer by David Nanninga, a doctoral student in the History Department at Baylor University. His research focuses on the Conservative Right in 20th-century America and its relationship to Religion, Culture, and Sports. In exactly one month, the eyes of the sports world will turn to Paris as the summer Olympics begin. Thousands of athletes from over 200 sovereign nations will compete... Read more

Abortion and the Catholic Church in the 1976 Election

June 25, 2024 By Daniel K. Williams

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The presidential election of 1976 presented the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) with a difficult dilemma. With the two parties taking opposing stances on the issue of abortion, one might have thought that the bishops would endorse the antiabortion party and its presidential candidate. But the bishops didn’t want to do that. That was not because they didn’t care about abortion. In fact, the bishops had already suggested that the abortion issue was their foremost political priority. Three years... Read more

No, the Humanity of Migrants Is Not a Joke

June 24, 2024 By Melissa Borja

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Over the weekend, while speaking to an audience of American evangelicals associated with the Faith and Freedom Coalition, former President Donald Trump did what often does on the campaign trail: talk about migrants. He described migrants as people who “come from prisons” and are “nasty” and “mean.” But as the New York Times reported, he went further this time and talked about pitching a new idea to Dana White, one of his supporters and the chief executive of the Ultimate... Read more

Adams, MacArthur and Evangelical Denial of Mental Illness

June 21, 2024 By Guest Contributor

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On the eve of mental health awareness month, a clip of John MacArthur made its way around the website formerly known as Twitter. In it, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Southern California denied the existence of such mental disorders as PTSD, OCD, or ADHD. He claimed that these diagnoses were simply “noble lies” that Big Pharma used to give psychologists license to medicate people, stating that mental illness was, in reality, the result of an inability to cope... Read more

Sea Peoples, Goths, and Barbarians

June 20, 2024 By Philip Jenkins

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If you study the historical background of the Old Testament, you will very soon come across the Sea Peoples. According to a widely told narrative, these were ferocious barbarian peoples who erupted into the civilized worlds of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean around 1200 BC. They posed a deadly threat to Egypt and were likely responsible for destroying other great states of the day. Among their ranks were the Peleset, the Philistines, who settled in Palestine, and ultimately gave the... Read more

Princesses and Policemen: Discourses of Human Trafficking

June 19, 2024 By David Swartz

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The stories they tell follow a formula that has been produced, reproduced, and adapted by dozens of NGOs, each aware of the power of narrative. Read more

Do Early Christians Hate the Body?

June 18, 2024 By Adam Renberg

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“Didn’t Augustine have a weird theology of sex?” This question was posed to me by a friend at dinner last week, after a discussion about the Confessions, and not unfairly. Augustine, she pointed out, claims that virginity is better than marriage and argues that succumbing to physical desire, even with a spouse, was sinful in some capacity. When we look at examples like this—and examples abound—we might question how the early church viewed the body and sexuality. At the very... Read more

On Young Evangelicalism’s Diverse Worship Leaders

June 17, 2024 By Erica Ramirez

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Hi! I am a cultural sociologist on a tour of Texas Megachurches. Check out my first post here! It’s the dog days of summer in Texas and I’m wilted. I hope things are better where you are. Over Memorial Day weekend, I revisited Westover Hills Assembly of God, one of the original five megachurches I intended to visit on my tour. For readers primarily interested in Christian Nationalism, I’ll offer that Westover Hills unabashedly observed the Memorial Day holiday. I realize... Read more

Going Home: Looking to the Past to Move Forward

June 14, 2024 By Verónica A. Gutiérrez

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I nosed my Camry slowly towards the Palos Verdes Peninsula on a bright afternoon this week, my three children squeezed into the back seat along with boxes and bags of our belongings. We had just popped in “Meet Kirsten,” an audiobook of historical fiction from the American Girls collection. The day before we had finished the last story in the Josefina collection, which detailed the life of a 9-year-old in 1824 New Mexico, and it had resonated powerfully with us... Read more

Constructing Social Problems: The Second Act?

June 13, 2024 By Philip Jenkins

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I have been writing about the sequence of books I had published in an earlier phase of my career on the construction of social problems and panics. The constructionist approach I used still seems to me to be very valuable. So might I ever go back to writing and research in that sizable area? What follows is is an intellectual exercise rather than an actual game plan, but I hope that addressing that question might be of some interest. Mainly... Read more