Antique illustration: Sleeping at sea

The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep

Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Older woman praying in an almost empty church.

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.
Jack Parsons

Sex-Cult Rocket Man

Jack Parsons, one of the “suicide squad” trio of young rocket-boy founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had an improbable extracurricular life.
Christ's Descent into Hell by Hieronymus Bosch

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.
L'Envoûteuse (The Sorceress) by Georges Merle, 1883

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.
Title page for Sinners in the hands of an angry God, 1741

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.
Anna te Drieën, 1528

Who Was Jesus’s Grandma?

Canonical scripture never mentions the parents of the Virgin Mary, but the body of St. Anne was vital to Christianity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Reverend Edward E. Hailwood, rector of St. Mark Episcopal Church

Fair Housing: A Church Against Itself?

A ballot measure aimed at overturning California’s 1963 Fair Housing Act revealed some serious divisions within the Episcopal Church.
Photograph: Anti-gay marriage protestors pray outside the Massachusetts State House March 11, 2004 in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Source: Michael Springer/Getty

What is Fundamentalism?

Fundamentalism, which shifts the balance between authority structures and the indescribable divine, emerged after medieval society gave way to the modern.