Any authors would be pleased by an array of laudatory and thoughtful comments on their work, especially by a group…
Public sociology: rigor and relevance
American religion
American religion in the era of Fosdick’s revenge
Is bland beautiful? Almost never, most of us would say. But when it comes to religion in a diverse society,…
Divine pervasion and the change that isn’t
Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the…
Farrakhan’s fading limelight
David Lepeska’s New York Times article “Farrakhan Using Libyan Crisis to Bolster His Nation of Islam” brought the once prominent…
Will Oprah Winfrey save us all?
Oprah Winfrey is the single most powerful woman in media. She presides over a multi-billion dollar empire as both mogul…
Mosques in America
In a CNN op-ed, Karam Dana and Matt A. Barreto, SSRC Academia in the Public Sphere grantees and co-principal investigators…
Spirituality, mediation, consumption
Oprah is a compelling object for the scholarly study of religion as a contemporary phenomenon. She is mass-mediated, commercial, and…
History and the historyless
Buried in the middle of William James’s chapter on “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience is the…
Church attendance and identity
In an essay on Slate, Shankar Vedantam speculates on why Americans tend to overreport attendance at religious services.
Don’t drink everything that runs downstream
Concerning recent (and seemingly conflicting) poll results from the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, Justin Reynolds is, I think,…