Sisters of the Holy Family, New Orleans

The Hidden History of Black Catholic Nuns

The lives and roles of African-descended women who joined predominantly white Catholic convents was deliberately hidden by congregational historians.
Turkish women waiting outside a mosque for friends before going in to pray, 1920

Mosques of Their Own

The long, little-known history of Muslim women in communal religious life.
Eva Frank

Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah

Was this revered female figurehead an empowered leader or a tragic victim in her father's wake?
Barabbas

A Passover Tradition to Promote Jewish Unity

Freeing a prisoner—a gesture of generosity and benevolence—may have been a way to bring together a fractured spiritual community.
A woman wearing a head scarf

Muslim Women and the Politics of the Headscarf

For many women, wearing the hijab was—and is—an element of piety, but it's been coopted into a political symbol.
An image of Marshall Applewhite from the poster for the docuseries Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults

Behind the Curtain of the Heaven’s Gate Cult

On the 25th anniversary of UFO cult Heaven's Gate's mass suicide, a religion scholar examines its theology and doctrines in the context of the New Age Movement.
Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna’s Anarchic Psychedelic Religion

Terence McKenna was an evangelist for the use of psilocybin and other mind-altering drugs, as a way to transcend and escape “untrammeled rationalism.”
Cover of Letha Dawson Scanzoni and Nancy A. Hardesty's All We're Meant To Be

Whatever Happened to Evangelical Feminism?

From Christianity’s beginnings, the religion has been split between two visions of gender relations.
Adherents of Santeria celebrate Santa Barbara on December 4 , 2002 in Isla de la Juventud, Cuba.

Music and Spirit in the African Diaspora

The musical traditions found in contemporary Black U.S. and Caribbean Christian worship originated hundreds of years ago, continents away.
Statue of Julian of Norwich, Norwich Cathedral

Julian of Norwich, Anchoress and Mystic

A religious recluse, mystic and author, Julian of Norwich wrote of Jesus Christ as a nurturing mother and teacher to the faithful.