with Professor Wendy Doniger This month The Religion and Culture Web Forum is pleased to introduce Playing with Fire, a new series of audio interviews and conversations about religion with academics and public intellectuals.  The series title is drawn from "Playing...

with Andrew Durdin and Brent Nongbri This conversation emerged from remarks given at a 2014 AAR/SBL panel dedicated to exploring Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. Andrew Durdin's paper, rather than offer a full review of...

December 2014 A Note from the Editor In accordance with the winter holidays and its custom of recent years, the Religion and Culture Web Forum will be on hiatus for the month of December.  The Web Forum will return with scheduled features in early January 2015. During...

November 2014 "Learning to Be Muslim--Transnationally" by Louise Cainkar (Marquette University) "Learning to Be Muslim--Transnationally" discusses the religious upbringing experiences and reflections upon them articulated by fifty-three Muslim American youth who were...

Antisemitism, Anti-Catholicism, and Anticlericalism by Alexander (Ari) Joskowicz (Vanderbilt University) "Antisemitism, Anti-Catholicism, and Anticlericalism" is the first chapter in Joskowicz's book The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and...

The Oprahfication of Rob Bell?: The Question of Desire, Resistance and the Megachurch Culture of Celebrity by James K. Wellman, PhD 1995 (University of Washington) The Megachurch is a logical extension of the American (and global) marketization of religion in a...

The Bible in America, America in the Bible By Seth Perry (PhD'13), Princeton University Seth Perry investigates "Americanized bibles" – bibles that include an array of extra-scriptural material emphasizing the Bible's importance to America.  These bibles participate,...

Endings Without End: When Prophecy Fails and the Rise of New Age Spirituality and Cognitive Dissonance by Betty Bayer (Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Martin Marty Center Senior Fellow 2013-14) Martin Marty Center Senior Fellow Betty M. Bayer explores the history...

A Disenchanted Exile: Secularism and the Islamic Revival among Second-Generation Palestinian Immigrants in Chicago by Loren D. Lybarger (Ohio University; Martin Marty Center Sr. Fellow) In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum, Martin Marty Center Sr. Fellow...

April 2014 Community Conflict and Collective Memory in the Late Medieval Parish Church by Kristi Woodward Bain (Northwestern University) "What role does conflict play in the formation of community identity? And how do powerful, even violent, moments sustain that...

March 2014 A History of Religion in 5 ½ Objects by S. Brent Plate (Hamilton College) "Religious history is incomplete if it ignores the sensing body, and the seemingly trivial things it confronts," argues S. Brent Plate in this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum....

February 2014 Religions of Iran: Pool Theory as a Non-normative Approach by Richard Foltz (Concordia University, Centre for Iranian Studies) In Religions of Iran: From Prehistory to the Present, Richard Foltz seeks to understand the diversity of Iranian religious...