Religion

I’m only trying to teach my religion students one of these things. At least that’s what I tell them.

A global map of Christianity is stalked by imperial ghosts.

John Haught dismantles the impoverished reasoning of most contemporary cosmology.

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

We can learn a lot from interdisciplinary conversation. But we are sometimes puzzled by how our colleagues know what they seem to know.

As we read about the rise of the spiritual but not religious, how do we respond? Do we think of it as a threat? A challenge? Or do we resonate with the category?

The U.S. Supreme Court's opinions about the relationship between religion and the state have been increasingly separationist, argues Phillip Hammond, a distinguished sociologist of religion and contributor to the so-called civil religion discussion. Although the nation "began as a de facto Protestant society," it has since the close of the Civil War moved toward greater and greater government neutrality not only toward differing religions but also toward the difference between religion and irreligion. This is as it should be, Hammond thinks. Behind the Constitution, he contends, is a "constitutional faith," and separationism, rightly understood, is its legal or judicial expression.

We could avoid all sorts of nasty fights, Stephen Jay Gould argues, if we would stop expecting science to provide validating evidence for religious dogmas or biblical events. Nor ought we to turn to religion to resolve questions of a properly scientific nature. He wants no more natural theology, no more "anthropic principle," no more attempts to find scientific confirmation for religious beliefs, and no more fundamentalist "creation science." In short, "science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven."