popular culture

How a television show can be a religious event.

The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious experience across the world?

The Christian symbolism in Daybreakers.

Representatives of Scientology have had trouble with prosyletizing in the past.

Mark McGwire gives thanks to “the man upstairs” as he confesses his steroid use, Tiger Woods is publicly urged to find Jesus—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, or the football, as the case may be, when it comes to the link between sports and evangelical Christianity.

As people around the world begin to reckon with the scope of the catastrophe in Haiti, we offer a set of responses to what was—for those whose work focuses on American religion—a shameful expression of prejudice and ignorance from a once-prominent evangelical leader.

For King, the challenges of a dawning age required a recognition that globalization had produced what he called a geographical togetherness and that this togetherness very much needed a spiritual grounding.

Carlin needed a God, wanted a God, but how could the Almighty be all-powerful if “everything he ever makes… dies”?

Cult of personality or empire?

This four-day rock fest in rural Tennessee is an endurance event, to be sure, but for many it is a makeshift spiritual retreat—a “vibrational healing ground.” The second in a three part series…