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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

Like Josh Marshall, I’ve been pondering the Gallup finding that Catholics are significantly more likely than “Protestants/Other Christians” to favor finding another location for the Park51 Islamic Center. Given that Protestants in the aggregate are, on most public issues, more conservative than Catholics–and given that American Catholics tend to recollect their own disfavored religious status…

The president’s Gandhian pilgrimage to India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans tend to efface their religious past. OK, so maybe there was no way Bobby Jindal could have gotten elected governor of Louisiana as a Hindu or Nikki Haley governor of South Carolina as a Sikh. But what about comedian Aziz…

I know you’ve all been waiting for me to explain why I get to drive around for the next two years with a “Don’t Blame Me I’m From Connecticut” bumper sticker. Here goes. The citizens who showed up at polls in the Nutmeg State last Tuesday were somewhat older, whiter, richer, and more college-educated than…

The most celebrated losers on the Republican side this election year were Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, who in any previous cycle since 1980 would have been identified as paladins (paladines?) of the religious right. Angle is a Southern Baptist who ran a Christian school and was endorsed by the likes of Pat Boone and…

OK, the aggregate House of Representatives exit poll shows that the good old God Gap is as wide as ever. Pew tells the story: In the great bathtub of voter behavior, everyone sloshed back towards the Republicans. That’s to say, from the white evangelicals to the nones, the GOP posted gains. Over at Huffpost, Eric…

* Among Delaware’s white college graduates, Christine O’Donnell loses by just three percentage points. * Among New York’s white males, Andrew Cuomo wins by just two percentage points. * In Pennsylvania, Sestak and Toomey split the Catholic vote. * In Kentucky, white evangelicals go for the Aqua-Buddhist by better than two to one. * In…

Two years ago, the excitement was palpable at the American Academy of Religion‘s annual gabfest in Chicago. The main hotel was the Magnificent Mile Hilton, from which you could look down at the white tents going up in Grant Park in anticipation of the election of Illinois favorite wunderkind Barack Obama to the highest office…

Last week, the Virginia Baptist Mission Board decided it was time to push back against the historical revisionism of Barton, Skousen, and Beck. that tries to pretend that the United States was not founded on the principle of separation of church and state. So it voted to commission a pamphlet for lay readers setting the…

If you’re not religious at all, it’s not going to increase your wellness to become moderately religious. Now if you become very religious, it’ll increase your wellness a little bit. According to Gallup. Moral: Don’t worry about the relationship between religiosity and wellness.

Whatever happened to Rod Dreher? As a writer he wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Actually, he wasn’t my cup of tea. But he had a distinctive voice that made him into Beliefnet’s premier blogger, and seems to have earned him his current gig as director of publications at Templeton. On his arrival, he moved his…
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