Social Science Research Council
Omri Elisha is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. from New York University and was a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, NM). He is the author of an essay entitled "Moral Ambitions of Grace: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism" (Cultural Anthropology, February 2008), and is currently completing a monograph, to be published by the University of California Press, based on fieldwork among socially engaged evangelical activists affiliated with conservative megachurches and faith-based organizations in East Tennessee.
I watched the last presidential debate in a crowded Manhattan restaurant with large-screen TVs and surround sound. By the end of the night, my drink tab was twice what it normally would have been, and it’s all because of Joe the Plumber. [...]
Read the rest of Presidential drinking games, and other secular devotions.A funny thing happened on the way to last Sunday’s Compassion Forum: the politics of religion gave way to the politics of confession.
Read the rest of The confession forum.It is impossible to overstate the significance of the local church pastor in the lives of conservative Protestants. Even in an age of Christian parachurch networks, media outlets, political action groups, and celebrity elites, the primacy of pastoral authority – and the larger congregationalist ethic on which it draws – remains a deep and impenetrable part of the evangelical subculture. But what does this authority mean in the present day and how does it pertain to the renewed prominence of religion in electoral politics?
Read the rest of The makings of a pastoral presidency?.
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