This wry memoir tackles twelve different spiritual practices in a quest to become more saintly, including fasting, fixed-hour prayer, the Jesus Prayer, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, and generosity. Although Riess begins with great plans for success (“Really, how hard could that be?” she asks blithely at the start of her saint-making year), she finds to her growing humiliation that she is failing—not just at some of the practices, but at every single one. What emerges is a funny yet vulnerable story of the quest for spiritual perfection and the reality of spiritual failure, which turns out to be a valuable practice in and of itself. Praise for Flunking Sainthood: " Flunking Sainthood is surprising and freeing; it is fun and funny; and it is full of wisdom. It is, in fact, the best book on the practices of the spiritual life that I have read in a long, long time." - Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath Jana Riess reminds us that saints are different from most of us: They are special, we are barely normal. They get it right, we rarely get it. They see God, we strain to see much of anything. And, Jana is no saint. Rather than climbing to the pinnacle and sitting on a pedestal to tell us how it could be, Jana slides right next to us and reminds us that sainthood is overrated. With humor and insight she whispers to is that our lives matter just as they are. She prods us to never let our failures hold us back. She calls us to something greater than spiritual success - ordinary faithfulness. Flunking Sainthood is the book I’m giving to my friends who are seeking to make sense of their emerging faith. - Doug Pagitt, author of A Christianity Worth Believing “Jana Riess may have flunked at sainthood, but she's written a wonderful book. It's both reverent and irreverent, and it will make you want to become a better Christian -- or Jew, or Muslim, or Zoroastrian, or Jedi, or whatever you happen to be.” - AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically "Warm, light-hearted, and laugh-out-loud funny, Jana Riess may indeed have flunked sainthood, but this memoir assures us that she is utterly and deeply human, and that is something even more wonderful. Honest and sincere, she will endear you from page one." -- Donna Freitas, author of The Possibilities of Sainthood “With a helpfully hilarious account of her own grappling with godliness, Jana Riess proves to be a standup historian well-practiced in the art of oddly revivifying self-deprecation. She loves her guides, historical and contemporary, even as she finds them alternately impractical, harsh, or "infuriatingly jolly." The book is freaking wonderful—a candid and committed tale of prayers that resists supersizing and spirituality that has no home save the glory and the muck of the everyday.”--David Dark, author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything “Jana Riess's new book is a delight—fun, funny, engaging and a powerful reminder that the greatest work in our lives is not what we'll do for God but what God is doing in us.” --Margaret Feinberg, www.margaretfeinberg.com, author of Scouting the Divine and Hungry for God “Flunking Sainthood allows those of us who have attempted new spiritual practices-- and failed-- to breathe a great sigh of relief and to laugh out loud. Jana Reiss’s exposé of her year-long and less-than-successful attempts at eleven classic spiritual practices entertains and educates us with its honesty and down-to-earthiness. In spite of Jana’s paltry attempts at piety and her botched prayer makeovers, God showed up in the surprising, sneaky ways that only God does. Jana is the kind of girlfriend I like to have--hilarious, smart, stubborn, irreverent, and totally gaga over God. She writes in the unfiltered, uncensored way I’d write if I had the skill and the guts (Oh sorry, Mom, I meant gumption, not guts.)” --Sybil MacBeth, author of Praying in Color

Since the 1970s, more and more religious stories have made their way to headline news: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, televangelism and its scandals, and the rise of the Evangelical New Right and its role in politics, to name but a few. Media treatment of religion can be seen as a kind of indicator of the broader role and status of religion on the contemporary scene. To better understand the relationship between religion and the news media, both in everyday practice and in the larger context of American public discourse, author Stewart P. Hoover gives a cultural-historical analysis in his book, Religion in the News. The resulting insights provide important clues as to the place of religion in American life, the role of the media in cultural discourse, and the prospects of institutional religion in the media age. This volume is highly recommended to media professionals, journalists, people in the religious community, and for classroom use in religious studies and media studies programs.

In Religion and the News journalists and religious leaders reflect on their interactions with one another and their experiences of creating news. Through a series of original contributions, leading practitioners shed light on how religious stories emerge into the public domain. Experienced journalists and religious representatives from different faith traditions critically consider their role in a rapidly evolving communicative environment. Aimed at journalists, faith representatives, religious leaders, academics and students this book offers a timely exploration of the current state of religious news coverage and makes an original contribution to the emerging media, religion and culture literature, as well as to media and communication studies. Religion and the News presents insights from leading journalists and religious leaders, many well-known figures, writing openly about their experiences. Contributors include: Jolyon Mitchell, Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues Edinburgh University; Christopher Landau, Religious Affairs Correspondent, BBC World Service; Andrew Brown, The Guardian; Professor Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford; Dr Indarjit Singh, Director of the Network of Sikh Organisations; Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, Director, Jewish Information and Media Service; Imam Monawar Hussain, Muslim Tutor, Eton College; Charlie Beckett, Director, Polis; Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent, The Times; Catherine Pepinster, Editor, The Tablet; Riazat Butt, Religious Affairs Correspondent, The Guardian; Professor the Worshipful Mark Hill QC, Barrister and Fellow, Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff University.

Religion. It's the greatest story never told -- or at least rarely told well. Though second only to education in the public's ranking of importance, religion reporting tends to turn up last in audience satisfaction. Reporting News About Religion takes aim at all the special challenges and difficulties that make this so. Geared to print and broadcast journalists, the book provides substantive information about religion and practical advice about covering religion stories thoroughly and sensitively. Buddenbaum divides her overview into three parts: the background information journalists need in order to understand religion and its role in American culture; the place of religion in the media, audience interests, and the implications of various practices concerning the definition, organization, and assignment of religion news; and reporting and writing techniques such as sourcing, story framing, and language use that can be especially problematic in the value-laden realm of religion reporting. Firmly grounded in the social sciences and in an appreciation of the protection given to all religions by the First Amendment, this book avoids the pitfalls and biases of most accounts of religion news. It features an annotated list of readings that will further inform students and journalists, as well as specific sources for information about a broad range of religions and religious organizations.

Whether the issue is the rise of religiously inspired terrorism, the importance of faith based NGOs in global relief and development, or campaigning for evangelical voters in the U.S., religion proliferates in our newspapers and magazines, on our radios and televisions, on our computer screens and, increasingly, our mobile devices. Americans who assumed society was becoming more and more secular have been surprised by religions' rising visibility and central role in current events. Yet this is hardly new: the history of American journalism has deep religious roots, and religion has long been part of the news mix. Providing a wide-ranging examination of how religion interacts with the news by applying the insights of history, sociology, and cultural studies to an analysis of media, faith, and the points at which they meet, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media is the go-to volume for both secular and religious journalists and journalism educators, scholars in media studies, journalism studies, religious studies, and American studies. Divided into five sections, this handbook explores the historical relationship between religion and journalism in the USA, how religion is covered in different media, how different religions are reported on, the main narratives of religion coverage, and the religious press.

In The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, Second Edition, Ryan P. Burge details a comprehensive picture of an increasingly significant group--Americans who say they have no religious affiliation. The growth of the nones in American society has been dramatic. In 1972, just 5 percent of Americans claimed "no religion" on the General Social Survey. In 2018, that number rose to 23.7 percent, making the nones as numerous as both evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics. Every indication is that the nones will be the largest religious group in the United States in the next decade. Burge illustrates his precise but accessible descriptions with charts and graphs drawn from more than a dozen carefully curated datasets, some tracking changes in American religion over a long period of time, others large enough to allow a statistical deep dive on subgroups such as atheists or agnostics. Burge also draws on data that tracks how individuals move in and out of religion over time, helping readers to understand what type of people become nones and what factors lead an individual to return to religion. This second edition includes substantial updates with new chapters and current statistical and demographic information. The Nones gives readers a nuanced, accurate, and meaningful picture of the growing number of Americans who say that they have no religious affiliation. Burge explains how this rise happened, who the nones are, and what they mean for the future of American religion.

When Pope Francis recently answered “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality, he ushered in a new era for the Catholic church. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a pope to express tolerance for homosexuality. Yet shifts of this kind are actually common in the history of Christian groups. Within the United States, Christian leaders have regularly revised their teachings to match the beliefs and opinions gaining support among their members and larger society. Mark A. Smith provocatively argues that religion is not nearly the unchanging conservative influence in American politics that we have come to think it is. In fact, in the long run, religion is best understood as responding to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society—perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders do resist prevailing values and behaviors, but those same leaders inevitably acquiesce—often by reinterpreting the Bible—if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures. So powerful are the cultural and societal norms surrounding us that Christians in America today hold more in common morally and politically with their atheist neighbors than with the Christians of earlier centuries. In fact, the strongest predictors of people’s moral beliefs are not their religious commitments or lack thereof but rather when and where they were born. A thoroughly researched and ultimately hopeful book on the prospects for political harmony, Secular Faith demonstrates how, over the long run, boundaries of secular and religious cultures converge.

"WHITE TOO LONG draws on history, statistics, and memoir to urge that white Christians reckon with the racism of the past and the amnesia of the present to restore a Christian identity free of the taint of white supremacy"--

Focusing on the crossover between the sacred and the secular, this volume gathers the work of media experts, religious historians, sociologists of religion, and authorities on American studies and art history.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel characterized Unsecular Media as a book that "leaves you thinking about the saintly role that religion has acquired in our allegedly irreligious media." Mark Silk's book is the first to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of how American news media cover religion.