How To Make Sense of the Latest Killing on Skid Row
Los Angeles police officers killed a man on Skid Row on Sunday night, shooting him outside the building where I work. He died, his body broken, as others’ have been, just a …
Author: dheller
Show Members the Money! Church Finance Series
A version of this article appeared in the Los Angeles Sentinel. Churches are required to be transparent and fiscally accountable and to work together to manage God’s money. But too many churches …
Building the Future of Religion, One Burrito at a Time: Service Groups and Religious “Nones”
On a recent Thursday night, a group of about 75 volunteers for the Burrito Project commandeered the kitchen and fellowship hall at the Church of the Epiphany to make 1,000 burritos to …
Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: Documenting Religion in a Brazilian Prison
CRCC research associate Andrew Johnson is not a filmmaker, he insists: he conceived the documentary, “If I Give My Soul,” while he was doing research for his sociology dissertation at the University …
The “Nones” Are Alright
This article originally appeared on Al Jazeera America. This article argues that far from becoming morally rudderless secular citizens, many religiously unaffiliated people are seeking ways of forming meaning and identity as …
A Pragmatist’s View of Religion
It is reasonably easy to be an armchair critic of religion. There are ample examples of religious leaders who compromise the values of their tradition, and the fundamentalists of every religion are …
Muslim Women Create A Mosque of Their Own in Los Angeles
This post originally appeared on Religion Dispatches. The day before the inaugural jumma, Friday congregational prayer, at the Women’s Mosque of America, M. Hasna Maznavi, who serves as the project’s President, was …
First All-female Mosque Opens in Los Angeles
This post originally appeared on Al Jazeera America. The first women-only mosque in the United States opened its doors in Los Angeles on Friday with an inaugural jummah, or prayer, by Edina …
Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India
Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India Chad M. Bauman, Author (Oxford University Press: 2015) The writing of this book was supported by the Pentecostal Charismatic Research Initiative. …
Who Will Care for the Rest? Executive Action on Immigration
(Photo by Stephanie Barto from Flickr Commons) The response to President Obama’s brief but pointed reference to the need for immigration reform during his 2015 State of the Union address was predictably …