Forget the forbidden fruit logo and the cult of Apple jokes. The legacy of Steve Jobs is anything but religious. Apple was conceived in the heady days of the counterculture movement. While Jobs and friend Steve Wozniak were busy hacking into AT&T;’s long-distance phone lines from a Berkeley dorm room in the 1970s, the culture was awash in New Age experimentation and social unrest. Traditional institutions were under siege by idealistic youth rejecting what they viewed as mass-marketed delusions. At the... Read more

Sikivu Hutchinson is an author and activist who promotes a progressive—and aggressive—conception of humanism that is at once feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, and anti-imperialist. She has no patience for nontheists who focus primarily on church/state separation, evolution, and other issues that, in her view, are being promoted particularly by white males within the secular movement. In response, Hutchinson asserts that humanism will only appeal to the masses of “people of color,” women, LGBT individuals, and other historically oppressed groups if... Read more

In the burgeoning field of American history and Civil Religion, a potential place of growth and greater exploration is the interaction of sport and the state. Already, scholars are beginning to address this idea. Works such as The Holy Trinity of American Sports by Craig Forney have begun to explore this concept.[1] What I’d like to do to in this short piece is examine the intersection of race, sports, and civil religion in the context of several well-remembered sporting moments... Read more

Change has come to one of America’s largest Christian denominations. Last week the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America elected its first female presiding bishop, the church’s top office. Bishop Elizabeth Eaton won in a surprise 600-287 landslide at the denomination’s triennial Churchwide Assembly in Pittsburgh. A 4-million member denomination with nearly 10,000 congregations, the ELCA is twice as large as the Episcopal Church, which elected its first female presiding bishop seven years ago. Like most mainline denominations, however, the ELCA... Read more

by Brian FoulksR3 Contributor*This first appeared in Syncopated Hustle I am a Pan-Afrikanist with a Calvinist bent that is deeply embedded into the Hip Hop culture and I grew up in the black church. I consider James Baldwin a left of center theologian and I consider Martin Luther King the greatest public theologian we have ever seen. I make no apologies for my ontological blackness but I do have major tension with my Calvinist bent-to the point I am not really a Calvinist. Hip... Read more

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by Earle FisherR3 Contributor I’m usually up to speed on current events – especially those with religious and political impact.  However, I was taken aback when my students in my World Religions class informed me of a judge ordering the name of a beautiful and bouncing baby boy to be changed from Messiah DeShawn Martin to Martin DeShawn McCullough.  The class took an awkward level of pleasure in the look of confusion, disgust and disdain on my face when they... Read more

For most gay Americans in the 20th century, the church was a place of pain. It cast them out and called them evil. It cleaved them from their families. It condemned their love and denied their souls. In 2004, a president was elected when religious voters surged from their pews to vote against the legal recognition of gay relationships. When it came to gay rights, religion was the enemy. A decade later, the story is very different. Congregations across the... Read more

The news media continue to stretch the boundaries of religion far beyond the usual parameters in the American popular imagination. Is belief in climate change a religion, as Rep. Steve King asserts? Did Steve Jobs create a new iReligion with all his visionary iProducts? Has Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead achieved the status of a spiritual icon? Look on the pages of HuffPost, follow the religion headlines in Google news, read through the posts at Patheos, and you will... Read more