Donald Trump won 84% of the white evangelical vote in 2020. To shore up that base, he’s now moving beyond conservative Christian values, to Christian nationalism. That nationalism, journalist Jeff Sharlet argues, represents a real and present threat of "simmering violence."
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religion
In 2020, Donald Trump won 84 percent of the white evangelical vote. We talk with some Southern Baptists today, whose views may surprise you.
When it comes to wonder and awe, historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, the author of “Doubt” and “The End of the Soul,” says there’s another, even older tradition we can all access – poetry.
What's the essence of religion? God? Scripture? Moral codes? Or is it really about something more unexplainable — primal spiritual experiences?
The religion scholar Elaine Pagels introduced the world to the ancient Gnostic Gospels. 25 years later, she's finally ready to talk about how her own grief — after the deaths of her young son and husband — shaped her religious imagination.
Religious historian Jeffrey Kripal believes that anomalous experiences — near-death experiences, telepathic dreams and other primal spiritual encounters — are the deep roots of religion. You might call it "religion before it becomes religion."
Jeff Kripal is a highly original, even maverick, historian of religion. In this conversation — part of a collaboration with the LA Review of Books — Kripal takes Steve to where all the weird stuff we can’t explain lives ... or hides.
We decided to trace Western culture's fixation on guilt back to one of its earliest origins — the story of Adam and Eve. It's only a page and a half in the Bible, but literary historian Stephen Greenblatt told Steve Paulson why it has been so influential.
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