Essay
The American South holds a unique place in the history of US democracy. From the fraught political landscapes of Reconstruction to the mass movements of the civil rights era, the region has repeatedly served as a battleground where the meaning of democracy has been contested, resisted, and reimagined. At the same time, the South has »
We gathered some of our friends to reflect on Dolly Parton’s life and work. “She was,” as producer T Bone Burnett told us for this piece, “the all-time greatest country girl.” And so much more. Dolly was part of the sparkle glue that held us all together. She was the very best of the South, »
Essay
On 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
I. 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
Faith 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
I 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
Every 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
Three 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 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
In 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
The 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 »
In 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, »