Yesterday the men on Tennessee’s death row, four of whom have scheduled execution dates in the near future, invited Governor Bill Haslam, the man who signs the death warrants, to join them for prayer Tennessee has more executions scheduled in a year than the state has killed in the past 50 years. Last week, as Christians around the world remembered Good Friday, the day Jesus was executed, legislators in the Bible Belt state passed a bill to reinstate the electric... Read more

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a premise to be true. Belief is closely related to faith that is confidence in a person, deity, or religious dogmata absent of facts. Faith is often a synonym for hope, and hope is relevant to any discussion of religion because without a shred of proof a religion’s dogma is true, its adherents can only hope they are not being deceived by teachings with no basis in fact. Young children... Read more

“My family thinks it is hilarious. My view hasn’t changed since the early 1990s!” laughed Anne Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Monius was referring to the coincidence that her faculty office was once the studio apartment where she lived as a resident at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR). Although the view from her window hasn’t changed, Monius, who is serving as acting director of the CSWR this academic year, can see... Read more

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There’s been a lot of conversation about the Supreme Court ruling to end affirmative action in Michigan. It presents an opportunity to explain some things that may be difficult for my fellow white folks to grasp. Hopefully I can do so in a way that doesn’t immediately induce scowls and burst blood vessels. I read a very helpful and influential book several years ago called Race: A Theological Account By J. Kameron Carter that opened my eyes to a critical... Read more

Here is a single paragraph from Peter G. Heltzel’s Jesus & Justice: Evangelicals, Race & American Politics. These five sentences describe a single tantalizing fork in the road, and a wrong turn taken. Understand and absorb these five sentences and you can understand the entire history of white evangelicalism in America over the past 50 years: In 1965 [Carl] Henry sent Frank E. Gaebelein to cover the march in Selma, Alabama. An associate editor of Christianity Today and the founder and headmaster of the... Read more

The outrage at Cliven Bundy’s comments about “the Negro” is bipartisan in way that the outrage at Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson was not. The two, you may recall, said broadly similar things about black people, but Robertson never used the word “Negro,” and Bundy never disparaged gay people in the name of his religious beliefs. We’ll start with what each said. Here’s Bundy, from The New York Times: “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. … “[B]ecause they were basically... Read more

Is religion the most important thing in your life? This is one of the questions people had to answer in a 2013 Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey as researchers tried to figure out how much faith influences people’s views on culture and the economy. They got pretty striking results: More than half of people who they considered to be “religious conservatives” said yes, while only about 10 percent of people classified as “religious progressives” said the same. This means that on a whole... Read more

Catherine Dunphy came to seminary in her mid-20s, full of passion to work in the service of the Catholic Church. By the time she left, for many reasons, she had lost her faith. “I had this struggle where I thought, ‘I don’t believe this anymore,’” said Dunphy, now 40 and living in Toronto. “I felt I had no space to move or breathe. I felt like an outcast.” Now, 10 years later, she is part of a new online project... Read more

I was on a conference call one evening last week when my call waiting beeped at me. It took me a few seconds to recognize the number since I only see that area code a couple times a year. It was my dad. I let it go to voicemail. I waited until the next day to check the message. His voice came amicably through the receiver and he chided me jokingly about turning 40 a few weeks earlier. My dad... Read more