Picture by Boris Stefanik on Unsplash. One sunny spring day in 2018, I walked into work to find a flier asking its readers “are you tired of feeling bad for being white?” The flier advertised a white supremacist organization called “The Right Stuff” with links to its website. I was surprised and quite concerned to…
Picture by Kim MacKinnon on Unsplash. Apocalypse: A Short History Apocalypse is, in a short definition, the history of the future leading up to the end of the world. While it is difficult to say precisely when apocalypse as a literary-religious genre first evolved, the form in which most encounter it today was developed during…
Picture by Rosemary Ketchum on Pexels. The author wishes to thank Timothy Rush and George Lundskow for their helpful input related to this essay. In a series of recent articles in the journal Critical Sociology my colleagues and I explored the hazards of conspiracy theories within contemporary media spaces and political culture. While conspiracy theories…
Picture of a Russian Orthodox Church (CCO 1.0) This article is part of our “Russia/Ukraine: Law and Religion Perspectives” series. If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strained the attempts of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) to maintain control and influence over its far-flung…
Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash. Given the centrality and heatedness of the abortion debate in the U.S. political sphere, it might seem as though abortion has always been a rallying cry for religious conservatives. But as Sarah Posner describes in her book Unholy, despite abortion’s contemporary significance, other evangelical grudges emerged “long before” abortion…
Million MAGA March at US Capitol East, November 14, 2020. Source: Elvert Barnes Photography. (CC BY-SA 2.0). “we live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable,” opined former President Trump in a press release issued through his new technology…
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash. As you can see, we’ve had our eye on you for some time now Mr. Anderson. It seems that you have been living two lives. In one life, you’re Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, pay your taxes, and…
Photo by Jake Ingle on Unsplash. This article is part of our “At Home and Abroad” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Every now and then, social media resurfaces a meme I’ve come to think of as the “American Jesus” post. A screenshot from a conversation on Facebook, the…
Image by Rafael Juárez from Pixabay. This article is part of our “Law and Religion Under Pressure: A One-Year Pandemic Retrospective” series.If you’d like to check out other articles in this series, click here. Guy Montag comes home from work each day to greet his wife. The two unfortunately share no intimate connection with each other, nor any Biblical…
Image by Hans from Pixabay. The millstone was an integral tool needed to grind grain to make bread and sustain life, and during Biblical times, it was deemed that taking someone’s millstone would be like taking his or her life in pledge. It has been analogized as an instrument of death, a wrath of severe…