Belief

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.

What explains the traditionalist Catholic infatuation with ‘The Exorcist’?

The Supreme Court opened the door to challenges on school prayer, 60 years after a landmark ruling in Engel v. Vitale.

On the white Christian legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

Female ghosts seem to dominate the afterlife. Whether the spirits are real or not, the reasons for the disparity could be revealing.

It was J. Edgar Hoover who did more than any fire-breathing churchman to turn fearful white suburbanites into the crusaders of a renewed conservative backlash.

15th century dogma connects the genocide and land dispossession of Native Americans with the enslavement and oppression of African Americans throughout history.

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.

A conversation about James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, “Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They are Anti-White.”

Many faiths face conflicts over institutional control. In Latter-day Saints history, the episode around the ‘September Six’ is particularly memorable.

What Betty and Barney Hill's alien abduction story reveals about America.

Betty and Barney Hill lost three hours on a New Hampshire highway in 1961. They spent years trying to understand it.

What should children learn in school? It's a question that's stirred debate for decades, and in 1974 it led to violent protests in West Virginia.

To fully understand the deep roots of today’s white Christian nationalism, we need to go back at least to 1493.

The Bonaventure Hotel was a battleground in the war between transnational real estate capital and the city’s multiracial working class.

On the 50th anniversary of "The Jewish Catalog."

On the complex relationship between Black Americans and the Black church.

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.

An iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality.

When drafting the Constitution, our founders had no need of prayer.

Moral panics repeat, again and again.

In “The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns sets out how the country’s first Catholic university profited from the sale of enslaved people.

The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness.

The political preacher who made the religion look bad.