The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep
Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Can Religion Be Helpful for People With Chronic Pain?
A group of researchers asked this question of a group of patients in secularized Western Europe.
Unmaking a Priest: The Rite of Degradation
The defrocking ceremony was meant to humiliate a disgraced member of the clergy while discouraging laypeople from viewing him as a martyr.
The Irish Fasting Tradition
Particularly before the Second Vatican Council (a.k.a. Vatican II), fasting was part of the Catholic calendar. No one took it more seriously than the Irish.
An Explosive Easter Celebration
The Orthodox Easter tradition of throwing dynamite on the island of Kalymnos echoes the Greek resistance to the Italian occupation of the 1940s.
Fire and Brimstone
If our conception of hell was absent from Christianity at the time the religion was born, whence exactly does it hail?
Railroad Chapel Cars Brought God to the People
Between 1890 and 1946, thirteen railroad chapel cars made their way across America, spreading a Christian message in rural communities.
Suicide by Proxy
In early Modern Europe, suicide was a sin to be punished with eternal damnation. Some women found an awful workaround: committing murder.
Radical Theology: A Syllabus
Radical theology aims to construct revolutionary understandings of myth, ritual, and scripture that speak to the dearth of meaning in our contemporary moment.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated
Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.