popular culture

Utah judge Clark Waddoups strikes down part of polygamy law in case of Sister Wives’ Kody Brown, ruling that although the state has the right to deny people more than one valid marriage license at a time, Utah’s anti-cohabitation laws violate the Browns’ First Amendment right to freedom of religion and elements of constitutional due process.

When we talk of a department of religious studies being the breeding grounds for a “new religious consciousness” together with Bellah’s evangelizing for republican civil religion, along with his desire to inform a “a new way of being religious within modern culture,” we can easily see how Bellah got the Berkeley secularists running for their guns. What was Bellah, a sociologist, thinking, anyway? Had he forgotten all he learned and taught about first-order religious institutions?

A mild-mannered schoolteacher doubles as an education-defending Muslim heroine.

Inmates at Guantanamo Bay are hunger striking in an attempt to make their suffering visible while children at a camp in Florida are using the fantasy of hunger as entertainment.

Two monastic orders in rural Kentucky, the Sisters of Loretto and Our Lady of Gethsemani, have made news recently for refusing to permit a gas company to install a pipeline across their property.

“Religious enthusiasm” or the American apocalyptic can be read as modes of the disaffection of the citizen in a time of political delegitimation. We often see this “religion” taking shape most clearly when we focus all the way down, to the odd hybrid of melancholy and triumphalism in these assertions about Damascus.

American Jewish history is the history of Jewish grappling with the American (and Protestant) category of religion. At the moment, it’s not working out so well.

Among other things, the Pew poll gives us the fascinating statistic that almost half of “Jews of no religion” are nonetheless believers.

On being Jewish and atheist.

Once again we obsess on the headlines but don’t bother with the details.