February 4, 2022 Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five responses to Philip Gorski’s American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump. In American Babylon, Philip Gorski has done the near impossible: marshal in one hundred tidy pages two millennia of political thought to explain American democracy’s current crisis. Though he insists ...

June 21, 2021 Yelle, Robert. Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. “The goal of this book has been to reread the historical archive so as to reveal that what we call religion is an anamorphosis, a distorted image that can be seen properly only from a particular ...

February 24, 2021 More than 100 evangelical leaders, including a number of influential pastors and seminary leaders, published an open letter today condemning Christian Nationalism’s role in the January 6 insurrection. It is a good and necessary statement, and one that begins as it should: by clearly identifying the problem. “As leaders in the broad evangelical community, ...

January 14, 2021 Méadhbh McIvor. Representing God: Christian Legal Activism in Contemporary England. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020. How is it, with centuries of political establishment, that Christians in contemporary England have come to feel that they are an embattled minority? Or, better, what does this perception of hostility sound, feel, look, and taste like? As brilliantly explored ...

December 28, 2020 Lepore, Jill. This America: The Case for the Nation, New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019         The twentieth century had its share of historians who, aghast at nationalism, abandoned writing national histories because they didn’t want those histories to become part of nationalist projects. Similarly incensed by nationalism, a considerable number of twentieth-century social theorists ...

December 11, 2020 If the 2020 pandemic is not to become “another tragedy of history from which we learned nothing,” Pope Francis warns in his newest encyclical Fratelli Tutti, then we need to turn away from the world as it is, fragmented and “bereft of a shared vision” for the human family, toward the world in ...