Grant Shreve holds a PhD in American literature from Johns Hopkins University. He writes about race, religion, and culture in the United States and is currently finishing a book on secularity, religious diversity, and the rise of the American novel.
On the controversial directive that a paragraph must contain a topic sentence, an idea that theorists, writers, and students have questioned for decades.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, many Americans experienced a crisis of religious authority. During this time, the idea of an unambiguous “plain Bible” began to gain traction.
How social work embodies its commitment to social justice has always been fluid. The history of the profession fluctuates between a focus on system and individual social problems.
Spiritualism was one of the nineteenth-century's most successful religious innovations, a movement of individuals who yearned for a religion which united mysticism and science.
Journalist, physician, and committed black nationalist Martin Delany took Frederick Douglass to task over, among other things, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
What does "boredom" even mean? As both a word and a concept, boredom is not a universal phenomenon but a historical construction specific to our times.
Julia Ward Howe wrote her most famous poem, the legendary Civil War song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in a single burst of inspiration 156 years ago.
Because of its commitment to continuing revelation, Mormonism is replete with examples of individual doubt that have resulted in more, not less, religion.
