Pope Francis is calling for a better way to hold together complicated family lives in the midst of official church teaching without alienating people who have marital issues and family problems.
'Hymn for the Weekend' mixes cultural and religious practices, commodifying them into a banal but beautiful message of imagined solidarity.
While it is important that black women begin to receive the accolades and assistance they are due from the Democratic Party, they cannot be expected to continue to save white people from the poor choices they make - based not on moral values but party affiliation.
The University of Pennsylvania and my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies have been routinely sent hate emails about me. Calls to fire me are numerous. Some have even come from within the university. The Penn Switchboard is flooded with calls, and the more conservative alums threaten to stop contributing.
Gentrification is stripping people not only of their homes but also of their dignity and their lives, and it is effectively whitening public spaces.
C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said, 'Whatever grows a church is good' and needs to be nurtured.
As a historian of American and African-American religion, I know that the Trayvon Martin moment is just one moment in a history of racism in America that, in large part, has its underpinnings in Christianity and its history. Those of us who teach American Religion have a responsibility to tell all of the story, not just the nice touchy-feely parts.
Trump's defense of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is gathering those who support him into a strong solidified base. Since the election of Francis, Republicans have been very wary of the Pope, attacking his liberal statements on homosexuality, global warming, and capitalism.
The prosperity gospel and its purveyors are worldwide and account for the rapid growth of Pentecostalism, the global religious movement prosperity preachers come from.
In a world where families are drowning on beaches to escape war, leaving the church because of sexual abuse, or denied access because of sexual orientation, the utopia that Pope Francis desires may be impossible for the church to attain.
The text, 'Is God a White Racist', By Rev. Dr. William Jones, is still studied by theologians and academics and taught in institutes of higher learning. The book called into question the chief construction of black liberation theology: that God is on the side of the oppressed.
The moment of true capitulation came when the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association quietly took Mormonism off the list of apostate religious groups.
What is the role of a public intellectual in the age of Twitter and soundbites? Is it to share your thoughts for the public good, or is it to curate the heaps of hate emails, tweets, and right-wing articles that trash your intellectual and social work?
The shooter's choice of Emanuel AME was most likely deliberate, given the church's storied history. It was the first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South, founded in 1818 by a group of men including Morris Brown, a prominent pastor, and Denmark Vesey, who would go on to lead a large, yet failed, slave revolt in Charleston.
In Pope Francis's 'Amoris Laetitia' (The Joy of Love), an apostolic exhortation on Catholic family life, he does not make earth-shattering doctrinal changes with regards to divorced Catholics, same-sex married Catholics, or the church's stance on homosexuality.
Whether Trump knew it or not, his strong language tapped into evangelical beliefs about the 'last days' and America's role in biblical prophecy.
Trump, despite his shallow depth of biblical knowledge, plays into both the apocalyptic end-time fears of evangelicals and their nostalgia for a 'small town' America.
McCain courted in 2008 what I would call 'fringe' evangelicals, in part because evangelicals were skeptical of his commitment to values voters. McCain's embrace of Palin came after having to scuttle endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley, charismatics who believed in Armageddon and fiercely supported Israel.