Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the…
Divine pervasion and the change that isn’t
American religion
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,…
Reviewing God in America
Over a week since the conclusion of PBS's three-night, six-hour television event God in America, new commentary on the documentary…
Judeo-Christian-Islamic?
On October 5, the Catholic University Law School gathered a panel of experts to debate "Islam and America: The Challenge…