May 16, 2018 Invited by the Council of Bishops of France in early April, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a rare speech addressed to French Catholics. In it, he presented his purpose as “repairing the damaged relationship between Church and State.” This was a marked divergence from his predecessors, who had kept their distance from the church ...

May 3, 2018 The past century or so of evangelical history in America might best be understood as a story of multiple rebrands. In the 1910s, evangelicalism drew on the expertise of business leaders like Henry Parsons Crowell of Quaker Oats fame to rebrand itself as “fundamentalism” through a massive print campaign that cast evangelical doctrine ...

April 26, 2018 As the already mountainous evidence of Trump’s immorality, or amorality, steadily grows, the commentariat is searching for a way to explain how he retains any Christian support. Michael Massing places Trump in a religious tradition with its origins in the pointed, sometimes vulgar rhetoric deployed by Martin Luther against those he considered enemies ...

March 23, 2018 Religion and Its Publics Co-Director Paul Dafydd Jones writes in response to Peter Ormerod’s recent article for The Guardian, “So Christianity is no longer the norm? Going underground will do it good.” *** ‘It’s quite a statement. “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good,” said Prof Stephen Bullivant ...

March 15, 2018 Religion and Its Publics Co-Director Charles Mathewes writes: “This is a nice bit of public theology, both in illuminating a contemporary situation by the organic use of theological categories, and also by explaining the meaning of those theological categories through applying them to a contemporary situation.” Read Nadia Bolz-Weber’s full piece, “We’re in the midst ...

March 8, 2018 Below, Religion and Its Publics Co-Director Charles Mathewes weighs in on Daniel Silliman’s recent Washington Post article, “Protestantism was born in Germany, but it was Billy Graham who brought evangelicalism there.” *** In Germany, “Evangelische” meant someone who was Protestant—who was for the “good news” (evangelion) of Christianity, in a distinctively Protestant way, as was traditional ...