Featured // Vol. 32, No. 3.
A Messy Category
essay by Shari Rabin
Our Past
Browse past issues and articles from the last 30 years
Essay
When Christians Join ICE
Faith, Enforcement, and Moral Authority in North Texas
by Michaela CalahanOn a Sunday morning in North Texas, a prayer for “those who protect our borders” is offered from a carpeted sanctuary just off a frontage road in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The congregation stands as the pastor names police officers, first responders, and “all who serve in difficult government roles.” Heads bow. A few congregants »
Poetry
Our Mothers Feared Our Drowning
by Nimalah Baaith-DucharmeI. At every beach a jellyfish has stung me. Red, marking me destroyed. II. We thought we were Poseidon’s small brown children, swimming off the coast of North Carolina. Bodies clamoring through the ocean with salted coughs, asking to see him, hoping our father-god saw our moms splayed on »
Art
Artist Statement: On Faith
by Brandon ThibodeauxFaith is often least understood when our footing is firm and most clearly revealed when that footing gives way beneath us. It does not spare us the furnace, nor prevent the fiery arrows from being loosed. Rather, it offers the quiet assurance that when our own strength fails, we need not stand alone. The language »
Back Porch
An Opening
by Marcie Cohen FerrisI grew up in a place where being Jewish meant you noticed other religions before you fully understood your own. In Mississippi County, Arkansas, faith was not a private matter tucked away for Sunday mornings—it was the air everyone breathed. During grade school, my Christian friends were saved now and again. We visited Black churches »
Essay
Learning Through Ritual Worlds
Día de Muertos, Convivencia, and Community Collaboration in the Nuevo South
by Sophia M. EnríquezEvery year, on November 1 and 2, a clearing of pine trees transforms into a temporary ceremonial world at the Avila Center just north of Durham, North Carolina. At its entrance stands an archway woven with cempasúchil (Aztec marigold) flowers, bearing the word Mictlán—the Nahuatl name for the land of the dead, where ancestors are »
Interview
Doorways of the Spirit
Searching for Wholeness in New Orleans
by Mark K. DolanThree African American women in New Orleans practice a spirituality that functions on the margins in a city dominated by Roman Catholicism. Alisha Johnson Perry’s story tells of her spiritual journey within her family, guided by mentors and her mother’s restless searching from church to church. Jamilah Yejide Peters-Muhammad, known as Mama Jamilah, is a »
Essay
The New Deal’s Southern Shrine
Religion and Memory at FDR's Little White House
by Darren E. GremThe Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, represents a site of southern religion atypical in origin and memorial expression, and overlooked in studies of the modern religious South. Unlike sites dedicated to other venerated persons across the region, Bible Belt evangelicalism did not shape »
Essay
Bottled Up
Booze, Blues, and Black Religion in the Jim Crow South
by Ahmad Greene-HayesIn the early twentieth century, many Black southerners were Saturday sinners and Sunday saints. After a night of unbridled self-indulgence—dirty dancing, drugs, sex, and so much more—they staggered, with heavy heads, into the vestibule the next morning, lingering in the back of the church, not yet entering the sanctuary. The author Joshua Bennett has asked, »
Snapshot
Snapshot: Religion
by Southern CulturesThe Religion issue features six photographs from artists that offer a “Snapshot” look at their experience of religion in the South. With gratitude to photographer Emily Rena Williams, who helped curate this special section. The Water Bring We, The Water Wanna Take We Back Kennedi Carter | Gullah Geechee Coordidor The culture of the Gullah »
A Messy Category
Religion in the US South
by Shari RabinIn his recent magnum opus, Religion in the Lands that Became America, religious studies scholar Thomas Tweed locates the earliest evidence of religious practice in the Americas at the Horn Shelter burial site, not far from present-day Waco, Texas. More than eleven thousand years ago, a man and a girl were buried, on their sides, »
Photo Essay
שיר אינסופי / Infinite Poem
by Emily Rena Williamsשיר אינסופי / Infinite Poem is an exploration of Jewish placemaking, both literal and metaphorical, in the Deep South. This work seeks to understand how Jewish communities in rural areas and small towns across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia have preserved their traditions while forging a unique identity in places that are often perceived »
Music
Remembering Dolly Parton
by Graham HoppeSince the news of Dolly Parton’s passing on Tuesday, the world’s rhinestones are all shining a little less brightly. Reading the obituaries in the hours since her passing, it is hard not to notice how similar they are. This is, in part, a testament to how meticulously Dolly honed a persona of positivity over a »
