Belief

The Supreme Court opened the door to challenges on school prayer, 60 years after a landmark ruling in Engel v. Vitale.

On the white Christian legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.

It was J. Edgar Hoover who did more than any fire-breathing churchman to turn fearful white suburbanites into the crusaders of a renewed conservative backlash.

15th century dogma connects the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans with the enslavement and oppression of African Americans throughout history.

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.

A conversation about James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They are Anti-White.”

Many faiths face conflicts over institutional control. In Latter-day Saints history, the episode around the ‘September Six’ is particularly memorable.

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.

Betty and Barney Hill lost three hours on a New Hampshire highway in 1961. They spent years trying to understand it.

What should children learn in school? It's a question that's stirred debate for decades, and in 1974 it led to violent protests in West Virginia.

To fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493.

The Bonaventure Hotel was a battleground in the war between transnational real estate capital and the city’s multiracial working class.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Jewish Catalog."

On the complex relationship between Black Americans and the Black church.

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.

An iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality.

When drafting the Constitution, our founders had no need of prayer.

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

In “The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns sets out how the country’s first Catholic university profited from the sale of enslaved people.

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.

Farewell to the senator's son who pioneered a TV genre, helped create the Christian right, ran for president, and earned the grudging respect of Abbie Hoffman.

How freedmen navigated an unofficially segregated Methodist Episcopal Church.

Through the tragedies and uncertainties of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln may have found a deepened connection to his religious faith.

Dwight L. Moody and the 1884 Haymarket Affair offer a look at what happens when Christians side with the wealthy instead of working class.

Remembering Mother Cabrini's humanitarian work for Italian immigrants.

Union soldiers improvised a Passover celebration near what's now Fayetteville, W.Va. They're being honored with a sign at the approximate site.

A conversation with historian David Hollinger about the rise of evangelicalism, the decline of mainline Protestantism, and the nature of America's secularism.

How Cesar Chavez married faith and ideology in his landmark farmworkers' march.