american south

South to America shows how one region’s beauty, losses, and inequities have shaped the country as a whole.

Journalist John Archibald turns the spotlight on himself, his preacher father, and White Christians’ failures.

Shoutin’ in the Fire is a testimony to Black liberation and love.

Philip Kolin’s poetry is about juke joints, bluesmen, mosquitoes, ladybugs, race, faith, and more.

A little-known O’Connor story explores the human cost of self-deception.

“It’s not that Southerners don’t get racial issues. We just don’t get them right.”

Stephanie Jones-Rogers dismantles the stereotype of white female passivity in the pre-Civil War south.

James Hudnut-Beumler profiles churches, ministries, and movements with long-held traditions and potential for change.

Paul Harvey's history shows how things could have gone very differently.

The faith-infused southern fiction of Tim Gautreaux, Robert Olen Butler, and Jamie Quatro

During seminary, I spent my summer breaks building bridges.

Edward Baptist so powerfully captures the pain and tragedy of plantation slavery that I had to force myself to turn each page.

2014 demonstrated that, whatever the significance of Barack Obama’s two terms as our first African American president, we have hardly moved beyond national struggles over race and class. Failures to indict white policemen accused of the unjust killings of black men precipitated protests and online shouting matches about racial inequality, or just how to talk about race. Christians participated in (hopefully) profitable discussions such as the December 16, 2014 “A Time to Speak” event, hosted by Pastor Bryan Lorritts of Fellowship Memphis, at the Lorraine Motel and National Civil Rights Museum.

December 16 was also the 300th birthday of George Whitefield, the most important evangelist of the Great Awakening of the 18th century.

Why did northern whites support a limited set of rights for blacks during Reconstruction, but then abandon them in the 1870s, and do little to stop the racial violence of the 1880s and beyond? Two new books shed important new light on such questions.

I understand Resident Aliens as a response to the sort of civil religion that makes people worse than they would be otherwise.

Our fall books issue includes annotated lists of essential titles on evolution and human origins, religion in the American South, and Jewish thought.

The disappearance of well-paying manufacturing jobs in the U.S. has decimated the middle class. It has also put stress on gender roles—especially in the South, where there’s a strong presumption, backed by evangelical Christian teaching, that being a man means providing financially for your family.