American religion

What’s Sincerity Got to Do With American Secularism?

Podcast
Join Matt Sheedy and Charles McCrary as they discuss a cultural history of "sincerely held religious beliefs." McCrary explores how SCOTUS has determined who and what gets to count as 'religious' and traces the historical development of American secularism. Be sure to tune in!

“A Space of Encounter:” The U.S. Military and American Religious Pluralism

Response
Raymond Haberski, Jr. writes that our interview with Ronit Stahl about Military chaplaincy "provides a nuanced picture of pluralism" in the United States. This reveals how massive institutions like the U.S. military operationalize pluralism to "both incorporate difference and flatten distinctions."

Sovereignty, Historical Memory, and the Importance of Aliite Worldviews

Response
"The processes by which the Aliites imagine their history reveal much about how state sanctioned ideas and institutions gain and maintain seeming natural validity," writes Chernoh Sesay, Jr., in response to our interview with Spencer Dew on the Aliites.

Understanding Evangelical Opposition to Climate Action

Podcast
Evangelicals don't oppose climate activism for the reasons you think. Listen to expert Robin Veldman and find out why "embattlement" matters more than eschatology when it comes to rejecting climate science.

Abusing Religion and the Importance of Refocusing Gazes

Response
"One can refuse to be manipulated by sensationalist media priming the public to generate the outrage that will serve white supremacy," writes Abimbola Adelakun in this response to our interview with Megan Goodwin on the theory of contraceptive nationalism in her book Abusing Religion

Race and the Aliites

Podcast
Complex issues of race, identity, citizenship, sovereignty, and Law come together in this interview with Spencer Dew about the New Religious Movements surrounding Noble Drew Ali and the groups he inspired.

Performing Scripture

Response
What are the limits of scripture as a performative concept? In this response to this season's episode with Richard Newton, M. Cooper Harriss examines Newton's hybrid understanding of scripture as a forceful and malleable process of signification.

American Religion, a New Journal for the Discipline and an Opportunity to Reimagine How We Theorize

Response
The "capacious model" proposed by editors Sarah Imhoff and Cooper Harriss for the new journal American Religion "could set this journal apart from standard approaches to the study of American religion," writes Andrea R. Jain in this response to RSP Episode 323.

Founding American Religion, the Journal

Podcast
Find out about the founding of the new journal American Religion with editors Sarah Imhoff and Cooper Harris

How Religious Freedom Makes Religion

Podcast
Tisa Wenger tells David Robertson how local, national, and international regimes of religious freedom have produced and reproduced the category 'religion' and its others in the modern world.

The Important Tasks Facing American Religious Demographers

Response
"By focusing entirely on cohort turnover, we may be missing some important individual-level changes in religious expression across the life course."

The Interplay of Religion and Popular Culture in Contemporary America

Response
In exploring the interstices running along the contours of religion and popular culture researchers must not neglect the embodiment and praxis of religious expression in popular culture and vice-versa. There was a time when the realms of popular culture and religion did not meet — at least in an academic or analytic sense. The space betwixt, between, around, and interpenetrating each was relatively unexplored. Into that gap came God in the Details:

Gods and Demons, Scholars and Lawyers: Brief Reflections on American Religion and Law

Response
Some religion scholars got into studying the law through studying New Religious Movements (NRMs) or minority religions, as they tend to be treated differently under the law. Talking to lawyers is a real skill, and is very good at it. In the subfield of traditional American church-state studies, legal historians, lawyers, lobbyists, and religion scholars convene for conservation and debate, mostly about First Amendment jurisprudence.

“Religion in Peru” — conference report, 2015

Response
That this conference took place at the National University of San Marcos was quite inspiring. This was the first university on the continent with a theology and arts faculty during the second half of the sixteenth century. Now, almost five hundred years later, Peruvian academics still have an interest in studying religion. However, our current perspectives and methodologies are far more diverse, and ever broadening. I remain optimistic that, in the near future, the academic study of religion in Peru will be as widespread and supported as other research areas.

“Understanding Religious Change” – 2015 ASR Conference Report

Response
77th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), 20-22 August 2015, in Chicago, Illinois. Conference report for The Religious Studies Project by Amanda Schutz, PhD student in the School of Sociology, University of Arizona. The theme of this year’s annual ASR meeting was a familiar one among social science conferences: understanding change. In her presidential address, “Complex Religion:

Hyphenating Identities

Response
We find ourselves in a time when countries like the UK and the US are, even now, officially providing their citizens the option of identifying via the use of hyphenated ethnicities. In yet another excellent Religious Studies Project interview, we hear from University of California Santa Barbara Associate Professor Rudy Busto talking about race and religion in the United States.

Religious Providence for Religious Action: Investigating Roger Allen Laporte’s French-Canadian Catholic Heritage

Response
I wish to deepen the discussion by investigating the discursive link and importance Catholic Ultramontanism played in constructing French-Canadian/Franco-American identity on both sides of the Canada/US border. In the early morning hours of November 9th 1965, a 22 year old Catholic man from upstate New York named Roger Allen Laporte self-immolated in front of the United Nations in New York City as a strong political protest against the Vietnam War.

African, Christian… Fake? Explorations in Religious Authenticity

Response
When Adogame rhetorically asks, “which kind of Christianity is authentic,” he implies that conversations on religious authenticity revolve around evaluating various strains of interpretation and practice. Or, put another way, that religious authenticity is a matter of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. But is it? A highlight of Afe Adogame’s interview is his emphasis upon the brimming capacity for African Christianities, whether in Western or African settings,...

Secular, Spiritual, Religious: American Religion Beyond the Baby Boomers

Response
In acknowledging how capacious and even misleading the “religiously unaffiliated” label has become, we might wonder if its growth is symptomatic of a taxonomy that has failed to keep pace with restructuring. In his wide-ranging interview with Dusty Hoesly, Wade Clark Roof both re-emphasizes the importance of the baby boomer generation and suggests some ways to think beyond it. In the second half of the interview, in particular,...
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