popular culture

This year, 2014, is the 40 th anniversary of the game Dungeons & Dragons, the pen-and-paper role-playing game that not only launched an industry but provoked a wide-ranging cultural shift. In…

It struck me, when reading Brook Wilensky-Lanford’s review of Magic in the Moonlight—in which she notes that Woody Allen’s film is “based on a story that’s almost too good to be true”—that attention…

The third iteration of the National Congregations Study, led by Mark Chaves and Shawna Anderson, was released last week and picked up on by the New York Times yesterday. It’s a fairly large study…

What inspired you to write Talking to the Dead? I vividly recall the experiences that sparked the book. When I was an undergraduate, I was a history major and had read some books about South Carolina…

The Satanic Temple, best known for its offer to build a monument to Satan in an attempt to challenge the Constitutionality of a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma, recently filed a Freedom of…

What inspired you to write Damned Nation? When I was an undergraduate, I was stunned by the sudden death of a loved one. My bewilderment and bereavement drove me to research the history of death. I…

There are places you never expect to be in life. For me, this was certainly one of them…

When I began attending Mars Hill Church in 2006, its main facility in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood was headquarters and clubhouse—a 20,000 square foot renovated hardware warehouse seating over a…

Calvary posits that faith is mostly a fear of death, but in reality, like Gleeson’s performance, faith is a living, changing, malleable thing. His Father James helps us understand why people still need religion.

Woody Allen’s new movie, Magic in the Moonlight, is loosely based on a story that’s almost too good to be true: Harry Houdini, master magician, for many years used his celebrity to debunk…