Belief

A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.

Panic about Catholics, Freemasons, and, later, Jews, is deeply woven into American history, and forms the basis of our fertile culture of conspiracy theorizing.

How a Hollywood marketing campaign was responsible for the Ten Commandments being displayed in public all across the country.

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention.

After the apocalypse that wasn’t.

How James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and others embraced a new Black humanism.

Spiritualists believed that after shedding the body in death, the spirit would continue on a celestial journey and help those on Earth create a more just world.

Henry James, spiritualism, and the afterlife.

I’ve been going back to eastern Kentucky for over a decade. Since 2016, something there has changed.

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

You can thank Eric Voegelin for the right’s clichéd catchall critique for the left.

Right-wing evangelicalism’s moral and religious descent into Trumpism has been near-total. Is there a way out?

Since colonial times, the Book of Esther has proved a powerful metaphor in American politics.

How the spectacle of the 1806 solar eclipse impacted the national consciousness.

An entire industry wouldn't exist without him, yet few know his name. In his songs, Knott challenged the faithful to examine their faults and hypocrisies.

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.

A new biography reveals how Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Americans a vocabulary to understand themselves in an era even more tempestuous than our own.

Aaron Bushnell and the age of immolation.

Remembering an exchange between George Washington and the poet Phillis Wheatley.

The President's spiritual journey transformed him and the nation.

As evangelicals worked to gain public legitimacy during the Cold War, historians of evangelicalism search for a usable past for their fellow believers.

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad," the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

The history of Black churches’ struggles offers both warnings and hope for the U.S. today.

The significance of New Year’s Eve ‘watch night’ services for Black Americans.

The new podcast discusses how purity is woven into many of the myths that have fed White supremacy in the nation’s past and continue to do so today.

Most of the Klan’s victims were African American, but many other groups have been targeted during the hate group’s century and a half of history.

Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?

The landscape for educational freedom is finally freed of 19th century prejudices, but other federal constitutional questions remain.

'All men are created equal' coexisted with the understanding that not all were meant to be treated equally in life.

The relatively unknown Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana has been elevated to the powerful position of Speaker of the House.