May 28, 202412 min read
“Spirituality”: Why Pundit Common Wisdom About It Is Largely Broken
Ryan Burge, a sociologist who garners attention as a pundit on US religion, recently published an essay on Substack about a poll on...
Feb 9, 202113 min read
A Brief History of the Study of Religion at the University of Tennessee
I wrote this history of transformations in the academic study of religion at the University of Tennessee: both macro changes in the...
Oct 21, 202016 min read
III. Pros, Cons, and Whiplash: Studying US Religions from a Base in Religious Studies
In the first and second sections of this three-part post—introduced here and expanded from an article in the Encyclopedia of American...
Apr 21, 20205 min read
The Death of My Old Hometown: Sucking Out the Wealth, Filling the Gap with Fecal Pollution
Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five. Here is...
Jan 2, 202013 min read
The Melting of a Glacier Matters Even If It's Still Very Cold: Evangelicals and Trump
NOTE: I am publishing tomorrow, in October 2024, a note to link back to this article which has continuing relevance even though it first...