marilynne robinson

This book is my own effort to equip myself to talk about and engage with the nation’s fastest growing religion, to offer a snapshot of one of its most influential institutions, and to tell the stories of the students and scholars who have taken up the challenge of this experiment in American education.

The first time I went to the American Academy of Religion conference it really got my hopes up. This was the fall of 2006 and, with only a summer in between, I’d just finished college and begun my first year of a PhD program in religious studies…

“Taking aim” at both the Religious Right and the New Atheists, a new book aims to make progressive politics safe for the religious, and religion safe for progressive politics.

Where contemporary culture has come to think of heaven as a place to chat, catch up with friends, and eat ice cream, conservative believers are concerned that God has been left out of the picture. A new book by Newsweek’s religion editor, Lisa Miller, covers this and other top stories on the celestial beat.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson’s third novel in as many decades is packed with the author’s signature themes of struggle, torment, grace, mystery and vulnerability-in other words: Christianity. Indeed, only a Christian of uncommon mettle could write a novel so untainted by the bastardized tropes of Christian culture.

Why has so much religious leadership come to look like “the bland leading the bland”? On the occasion of Pentecost, we present a romp through the wide range of Protestantisms, and answer the question: Why is that biblical book called “Acts” and not “Lazing About”?

Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett—the new atheists are often out of their depth when it comes to real engagement with religious ideas. And what if the new atheism is not so much about theology as about politics?