Robert G. Ingram’s Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2018) radically reinterprets the English Reformation. Subjects in eighteenth-century England didn’t know they were l...

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park,

As the practice of mindfulness permeates mainstream Western culture, more and more people are engaging in a traditional form of Buddhist meditation. However, many of these people have little interest in the religious aspects of Buddhism,

In All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), David C. Posthumus, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota,

I’ve often asked myself this question: “How do religions begin?” I don’t know about you, but I think I would be very, very skeptical if someone told me that they’d had just received a revelation, communicated with some spiritual “higher power,

Unlike many of the other early Christian texts, the Gospel of John emphasizes the name of the Father alongside the name of Jesus—why? One reason, says Joshua Coutts, is because of the significance of God’s name in the Old Testament book of Isaiah.

Today I talked with Brian Stanley, professor of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, about his new book, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton University Press, 2018).

In the wake of the bloody Civil War, millions of slaves were emancipated. How did those freed slaves, along with African Americans freed before the Civil War, interpret this new post-war world? Dr. Matthew Harper’s The End of Days: African American Rel...

Samuel Helfont‘s Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2018) makes an invaluable contribution to an understanding of Iraqi strongman’s Saddam Hussein harnessing of Islam in support...

In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both sch...

Religious music can be a source of comfort and release, but also a remembrance of sadness and loss. In Sense and Sadness: Syriac Chant in Aleppo (Oxford University Press, 2018), Tala Jarjour analyzes the Syriac chant sung in Aramaic used by the small C...

Was the Hebrew Psalter purposefully shaped and arranged by editors to convey a particular theological message? Adam Hensley says yes. By examining the relationship between the Davidic covenant and the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants,

How would Israelites have understood their nation’s covenant relationship with Yahweh? Dr. Robert Miller II offers a study of the Old Testament language of covenant within its ancient context, especially in light of Assyrian ideology.

There are many who believe Moses parted the Red Sea and Jesus came back from the dead. Others are certain that exorcisms occur, ghosts haunt attics, and the blessed can cure the terminally ill. Though miracles are immensely improbable,

Surprising to many, white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election at a higher rate than any candidate in the previous four presidential elections. At the same time, the Evangelical community is changing,

Ruth Gamble’s Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Karmapa and the Invention of a Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a thorough and accessible study on reincarnation, the tulku tradition in Tibet, and the life of the Third Karmapa,

The tensions found between Reason and Revelation, between the traditions of the Bible and Greek thought, were central to pre-modern philosophy and in a sense remain so today. We live in an age beholden to both the religious and the secular as ways of u...

In 1971, a Sri Lankan Sufi arrived in Philadelphia to address a group of spiritual seekers. This trip initiated the career of one of the most influential teachers in the history of North American Sufism. In Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in A...

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss,

In her book Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), Dr. Jessica Johnson chronicles the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church, an evangelical megachurch that started in Seattle in the 1990’s...

A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet,

Christopher Grasso is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. His book Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the tensions and ongoing dialogue between religious f...

In his speech delivered to the National Convention on 18 Floréal (May 7, 1794), Maximilien Robespierre shocked his listeners as he attacked the proponents of atheism and dechristianization in the government: “Who nominated you to tell the people that G...

Today I talked with D. G. Hart, an historian at Hillsdale College, MI, and the author of many books, including Calvinism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013). Listed on the front cover of Time (2009) as one of the ten “ideas changing the world righ...

Harold Morales, an associate professor of Religion at Morgan State University, is the author of the momentous new book, Latino and Muslim in America: Race, Religion, and the Making of a New Minority (Oxford University Press, 2018).