This essay will explore white Americans’ use of the rhetoric of church/state separation as a discourse of racial difference during the period from roughly the Revolution to the Spanish American war, when the United States both conquered vast spaces o...
Right-wing populists across many western countries have markedly intensified their references to Christianity in recent years. However, Christian communities’ reactions to such developments often vary significantly, ranging from disproportionate supp...
From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, the practice of private confession to a priest was a mainstay of Catholic parish life in the United States. By the 1970s, Catholics had largely abandoned the practice of private confession. One dominant nar...
Contemporary case law in the United States surrounding the establishment clause of the federal Constitution has entered a period of remarkable uncertainty. Now is an appropriate time to revisit the legal foundations of the Supreme Court’s semin...
This article analyzes new monastic efforts to engage with systemic inequality in the United States and South Africa, arguing for the importance of the concept of friendship to new monastic social justice efforts. Growing in popularity during the 2000...
Genealogy is one of the most popular sociocultural pursuits in modern U.S. history. During recent decades, scholars of the history of American genealogy and family history have forwarded an argument that its development since the 19th century is char...
Scholars have argued that World War I and its aftermath caused a rapid transformation in American global philanthropy. The decline of the American “moral empire” coincided with the rise of professional, bureaucratic, and secular philanthr...
This essay examines how the United States Military Academy at West Point developed an explicitly “federal” Christianity to help train the antebellum officers of the United States Army. It begins by examining how the Episcopal Church was quietly “esta...
This article explores the growing affinity for the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church by far-right Orthodox converts in the United States, highlighting how the spiritual draw to the faith is caught up in the globalizing politics of traditionalism an...
This paper examines the separation of church and state in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, contextualizing it within the process of American overseas expansion and considering it as one of the projects of imperial hegemony c...
The establishment of the United Church of Christ in Japan (nihon kirisuto kyōdan 日本基督教団) marked the culmination of the Church Union Movement in Imperial Japan. Although the Church Union Movement can be t...
The article explores the intersection of Black Lives Matter and the synodal process within the U.S. Catholic Church, focusing on the church’s stance on racism and racial justice. Drawing upon Pope Francis’ call for the church to become a...
This conceptual essay discusses how university athletic departments and local churches can collaborate in providing spiritual care for intercollegiate athletes in the United States. Parachurch organizations such as Athletes in Action (AIA) and the Fe...
Millennials are the most analyzed and populous generation in the United States. Collectively, they have been slowly re-shaping the American culture. Protestant Millennials, a subset of this generation, have been ruffling feathers in their local churc...
Though commonly identified with the conservative politics of the Christian Right, over the past decade evangelicals in the United States have increasingly embraced a more politically progressive range of social concerns. Often treated as something wh...
Utah, USA, a state with a unique history of immigration and a distinctive religious context, provides a useful setting in which to study the intersection of racism and religious participation with immigrant integration. Utah is one of the Whitest sta...
The paper explores similarities in patterns of abuse and in patterns of how the known abuse cases are handled by the Catholic church and the U.S. military and develops preliminary explanations of why. The paper considers how the two organizations dea...
This work first develops the idea of an American Separationist Mindset—a deeply rooted and often unthinking supposition that the strict separation of church and state is the only defensible church-state arrangement under the Establishment Claus...
Many new psychedelic religious organizations have recently emerged in the United States. These psychedelic churches operate in a legal gray area, which provides job opportunities not just for lawyers but also for philosophers of religion. To gain leg...
The central premise of this article is that synodality ought to be grounded in the Eucharist. The author explores the implications of this claim in the areas of ecclesiology and ethics. On the side of ecclesiology, the author argues that the Eucharis...
This article explores the becoming-church of fake news against the background of the rise of the mediatization of faith and religious beliefs through classic media supports, such as newspapers, magazines, and journals, between 1840 and 1863 in the Un...
While active female Benedictine monasteries in the United States presently are in a state of decline, the needs of the Church and world indicate that the Benedictine charism is greatly needed today. This article explores some of the historical develo...
This paper chronicles the evolution of the presbyterate of the Ruthenian Byzantine Metropolitan Catholic Church in the United States of America from the time of the first wave of immigrants to the United States to the present day. It looks at critica...
Formed alongside the arrival of the first Korean immigrants in Hawaii in 1903, the Korean American Protestant Church has played a significant role in the social, political, and religious lives of Koreans in the United States. However today, membershi...
The contemporary social moment in the United States has affirmed the critical importance of racial justice, and especially claims to justice informed by the contributions of structural and institutional forces connected with the nation’s origin...
Past findings and theory in the sociology of religion support two opposing perspectives concerning the influence of religion on American politics. Looking from within the United States, the commanding influence of religion on political rhetoric and v...
In Cuba and the United States, Protestant institutions exist that are both reflective and nonreflective about their culture’s influence on belief and practice. The case of Cuba sheds light on how Christian churches and voluntary associations op...
Social Network Analysis (SNA) has shed light on cultures where the influence of patronage, preferment, and reciprocal obligations are traditionally important. We argue here that episcopal appointments, culture, and governance within the Catholic Chur...
Through the years, people of faith and their congregations have encountered social issues without easy answers. From racism, women’s rights, and poverty to the current divisions over abortion and human sexuality, the church has wrestled with di...
This essay analyzes Pope Francis’ social teaching on relationality within his 2020 encyclical letter Fratelli tutti [Brothers all]. The relationship between the Church and modern nation-states is an important macro-level social dynamic, and Fra...
This article examines the complex politics surrounding the Catholic Bishops’ responses to clerical sexual abuse in the United States from the first, public revelations of the scandal in Boston in 2002 to the present. It asks a compelling leadership q...
For centuries, the Catholic Church has been a major social actor in the provision of health services, particularly health care delivered in hospitals. Through a confluence of powerful environmental forces at the beginning of the twenty-first century,...
The Catholic Church in the United States is no longer a Euro-American church receiving immigrants. Rather, it is an immigrant church, the cross-cultural Body of Christ. Serving such a diverse church is difficult and complex, providing both prophetic...
In the context of global modernization, both the United States and China faced major challenges in rural social development. In the early twentieth century, the American federal government launched the Country Life Movement, during which Christianity...
Since the 1980s, the United States has witnessed increasing wealth concentration in the hands of the ultra-rich. Measured at the state level, the top 10 percent of income earners amassed roughly 43% of total income, and economic growth only enhanced...
Studying the intersectionality of religion and social welfare in Richmond, Virginia requires going back to the beginning of the Virginia colony. In the crucible of the colony, the religious and social welfare functions of a parish community were one...
During the COVID-19 crisis, the Korean government’s restrictions on religious freedom have caused several reactions. These can be divided into two categories: first, as several Christian groups have become the center of controversy over exacerb...
The freedom to practice one’s religious belief is a fundamental human right and yet, for millions of people around the world, this right is denied. Yearly reports produced by the US State Department, United States Commission on International Re...
Isolation and integration are two sides of the same coin, the former denoting negativity with the latter denoting positivity. The penetration of the LDS church into Nigeria in general and south-western Nigeria in particular has been faced with a cons...
We demonstrate that, in comparison to religious groups showing reliable, contemporary voting tendencies (e.g., white evangelical Protestants voting Republican, Jews and Muslims voting Democratic), Roman Catholics show far less consistency in supporti...
This article will briefly address the origins of confirmation and the current approaches to adolescent confirmation. Moreover, the article discusses the two predominant models of confirmation in the Catholic Church in the United States and the predom...
Historically, Protestant churches in Latin America regarded the ‘world’ as a realm of sin and impurity. The proper focus of the church, they believed, was on salvation, and building a community of the saved. In recent years, this has begu...
Of the many questions on which our title invites reflection, one in particular has again achieved prominence in the United States: how is a politician who is Roman Catholic expected to vote when a measure purports to legalise what church teaching say...
Between 1937 and 1945, numerous American journalists became gravely concerned about a rapidly growing Mexican Catholic right-wing movement, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS). Founded in 1937, the UNS spread rapidly across Mexico and by 1941...
The following ethnographic and folkloric analysis of American exorcism practices post-1998 centers on four Catholic priest-exorcists currently active in the United States. After a brief commentary regarding the place of Satanism within contemporary C...
The study examines how members of the historically white possessive and supremacist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States (mis)appropriated Māori genealogy, known as whakapapa. The Mormon use of whakapapa to promote Mo...
A growing literature has sought to understand the relationships between religion, politics and views about climate change and climate change policy in the United States. However, little comparative research has been conducted in other countries. This...
This paper examines the Assumptionists’ mission, known as the Mission d’Orient, initiated in 1862 with the aim of uniting the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches against the backdrop of a changing political and religious landscape. Despi...
The liturgical reforms of the mid-twentieth century had major impacts on not only the forms of liturgies in the Western church but also on liturgical theology. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, the Anglican province in the Unite...
As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are progressively integrated across life domains, religious organizations are negotiating opportunities and tensions as AI applications are incorporated into their daily practices. Given the limited and gr...
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