Religion has not, or not yet, become an important ingredient of the nastiness in the current presidential campaign. It has been quiet around Mitt Romney’s Mormonism, possibly because he has spouted language that might make Southern Baptists feel comfortable (though it surely makes some other people uncomfortable). Michele Bachmann’s affiliation with the Lutheran Wisconsin Synod […]

The May 2012 issue of Commentary (the generally conservative monthly with a strong Jewish focus) carries an article by Michael Medved, entitled “What the Evangelicals Give to Jews”. Medved is a highly productive writer and television personality, very articulate and almost always interesting. Based in California, he is an observant Orthodox Jew, who has moved […]

In the mid-1980s, when David Martin began his pioneering studies of Pentecostalism, this phenomenon was the elephant in the living room of the scholarly study of religion: It was well on the way of  becoming the fastest growing religious movement in history—from scattered groups in the early years of the twentieth century to what is […]

In the words of “Monty Python and the Flying Circus”—now for something completely different:When I started writing this blog, I had no preconceived idea about the frequency or schedule of its postings. After a while it became clear to me that once a week was about the right frequency (since there are a few other […]

On April 13, 2012 Religion News Service carried a story about Andrew Bowen, a 29-year old resident of Lumberton, North Carolina. Throughout the year 2011 he practiced a different religion each month—Hindu in January, Baha’i in February, Zoroastrian in March, and so on. Bowen had what he called a teenage experience of “Christian fundamentalism”. Married […]

Reading the New York Times at breakfast is more than a habit. It is a sort of addiction. One experiences withdrawal symptoms in places where the paper is not available (especially when the only alternative is USA Today). At least in this country, the Times has no serious rival for good international news coverage, by […]

On April 6, 2012, Religion News Service carried a story originally reported in the Dallas Morning News. Judge Martin Hoffman, of the Dallas district court, dismissed a lawsuit brought by Mikey Weinstein against Gordon Klingenstein. Weinstein, a former Air Force lawyer, is an avowed atheist and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which opposes […]

The German presidency is a largely ceremonial office, though its incumbent is supposed to represent the political virtues of the Federal Republic. Thus the scandal forcing the recent resignation from the presidency of Christian Wulff on February 17, 2012, while closely followed (and perhaps caused) by the German media, was not much noticed abroad. Nor […]

\When the nice people at The American Interest invited me to start a blog on religion, they said that, if so moved from time to time, I could write on other topics. Mostly I have not been so moved. I am now. As I watch, with more or less appalled fascination, the unfolding circus of […]

William Hughes Hamilton died on February 28, 2012, aged 87. His passing was barely noted in the media, a fact both sad and instructive. Along with a small group of other individuals, he attained sudden celebrity status in the 1960s as one of the founders of the so-called “death of God theology”. The phrase had […]