Belief

A long Euro-American tradition of genocide and ethnic cleansing imagined freeing a barren Palestine from Palestinian barbarity and heathenism.

Why did so many American Jewish women find Christian Science appealing?

After the apocalypse that wasn’t.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

You can thank Eric Voegelin for the right’s clichéd catchall critique for the left.

Christian supremacists are plotting the end of America as we know it.

Right-wing evangelicalism’s moral and religious descent into Trumpism has been near-total. Is there a way out?

Since colonial times, the Book of Esther has proved a powerful metaphor in American politics.

How the spectacle of the 1806 solar eclipse impacted the national consciousness.

An entire industry wouldn't exist without him, yet few know his name. In his songs, Knott challenged the faithful to examine their faults and hypocrisies.

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.

Aaron Bushnell and the age of immolation.

Remembering an exchange between George Washington and the poet Phillis Wheatley.

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.

As evangelicals worked to gain public legitimacy during the Cold War, historians of evangelicalism search for a usable past for their fellow believers.

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

The history of Black churches’ struggles offers both warnings and hope for the U.S. today.

The significance of New Year’s Eve ‘watch night’ services for Black Americans.

The new podcast discusses how purity is woven into many of the myths that have fed White supremacy in the nation’s past and continue to do so today.

Most of the Klan’s victims were African American, but many other groups have been targeted during the hate group’s century and a half of history.

Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?

The landscape for educational freedom is finally freed of 19th century prejudices, but other federal constitutional questions remain.

'All men are created equal' coexisted with the understanding that not all were meant to be treated equally in life.

The relatively unknown Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana has been elevated to the powerful position of Speaker of the House.

What explains the traditionalist Catholic infatuation with ‘The Exorcist’?