Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises.

In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory--it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked.

Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter (Harvard UP, 2021), she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society.

Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.

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A conversation with Fr. Bogdan Bucur and Dr. Razvan Porumb

This publication represents the officially authorized translation of The Journal of Joy (SVS Press, 2025), carefully rendered to uphold the integrity of the original text in Romanian.

The ethos Steinhardt recommends to Christians is that of an aristocrat minus the stiff upper lip and aloofness, a style molded by kindness, calm, good manners, respect for the dignity of others, and thus for one's own dignity. Christ Himself, he emphasizes, always possessed ‘knightly’ traits: He is discreet, respectful; He knocks on the door and waits, never discouraged by a refusal; He is not suspicious but trusts, not greedy but gives abundantly; He forgives easily and completely; He is attentive and polite (‘Friend,’ He says to Judas, whose betrayal He knows well). In Him, there is no moralism or legalism, but rather the ability to discern in every person, beyond sin, the person that God calls and enables to love. Beyond totalitarianism, which is the fascination with power and death, and beyond market society, which holds up profit as its only god … If the journal of this resistance opens up for the future, it does so precisely because it is a Journal of Joy.

Olivier Clément, from the Preface to the French edition of the Journal of Joy

This is the Journal of Joy, a joy founded on the Resurrection, unconquerable by the manifest powers of death. Now at last available in English, its joy can help transform the petty anxieties that beset us.

Archpriest Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus, Durham University

Translation by Paul Boboc, revised by Peter Andronache, with further revisions and explanatory notes by Peter Andronache, Bogdan G. Bucur, Nicolae Drăgușin, Brenda Mikitish, and Răzvan Porumb. Foreword by Răzvan Porumb.

About the Author:

Nicu Steinhardt, known in his later monastic years as Father Nicolae de la Rohia, was born in 1912 near Bucharest to Jewish parents. A refined scholar who had established himself as one of the most erudite voices of his generation, he was imprisoned by the repressive communist regime in 1960. Steinhardt asked to be baptized in his cell—“illicitly”—and eventually found profound joy amid the suffering and despair of the prison. After an extraordinary experience of Christ, the intense happiness accompanying him perpetually transfigured the cruel and gloomy surroundings into a luminous world permeated by God’s love and grace—which is why writing the Journal in the early 1970s was essential, even in the knowledge it would be banned by the communists. Nicolae Steinhardt, then a monk at Rohia, passed away in March 1989, nine months before the 1989 December Revolution toppled the communist dictatorship.

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Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2025) is an Immigration and labor history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the US

At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of immigrants from the borderlands of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires built a transnational church in North America. The community that church leaders called American Orthodox Rus’ was created by and for working people, and transformed believers’ identities as Eastern European migrants, as Orthodox Christians, and as American workers.

Given how strongly the Russian Orthodox Christian community was tied to working class industrial life, this book makes the case that we cannot understand the scope of working class and immigrant religion in the United States without understanding American Orthodox Rus’. The work Russian Orthodox immigrants did in the Progressive Era United States occurred in factories, foundries, and mines; they lived mainly in industrial cities and mining towns; and they almost immediately got caught up in the most pivotal—and sometimes violent—political and social crises of their times, both nationally and internationally. To address their needs in these contexts, the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its missionary efforts in North America, forming a network of social and material aid for working-class believers. This book traces the rapid growth of this transnational religious world, then explores its unexpected collapse under the weight of the First World War, a global pandemic, and the transnational reach of revolutionary political change in Russia. A story of challenge and resilience, Orthodoxy on the Line complicates dominant paradigms in the study of labor and North American Religions.

Guest: Aram G. Sarkisian (he/him) is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the United States.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: here

Linktree: here

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Vatican journalist Colleen Dulle discusses her new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter, a memoir of the last seven years. In 2018, she started for the Jesuit Review, America Magazine, and that was when all of the terrible revelations of sexual abuse scandals, lies and coverups, about [former cardinal, later defrocked] Theodore McCarrick became the main story, then [former nuncio, later excommunicated] Carlo Maria Viganò’s schismatic campaign, then Jean Vanier, then Marco Rupnik. Each betrayal shook our faith. “One woe doth tread upon another's heel, / So fast they'll follow,” says Gertrude in Hamlet, learning of Ophelia’s death. Colleen talks about these and the fractured body of the Church, a “crisis of community” as well, among other topics. It’s a personal and raw discussion. But these fiery trials might be the proving crucible that has made her faith stronger, wrestling with God, as Jacob did, and throwing plates in honest anger, as Pope Francis recommended.

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David Whitford joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, The Making of a Reformation Man: Martin Luther and the Construction of Masculinity (Routledge, 2025). This volume explores how Martin Luther's life and teachings reshaped and redefined masculinity during the Reformation, offering a more nuanced portrayal of him as a man grappling with the complexities of fatherhood, marriage, and the battlegrounds of religious controversy. This book demonstrates how Luther forged a new ideal of Christian manhood by examining his struggles with monastic vows, his transformation of the household as a spiritual center, and his reshaping of male authority. Integrating insights from cultural historians, gender studies, and feminist scholarship, Whitford analyzes the intersections of gender, power, and religion during a time of profound social upheaval and change. Through Luther's personal transformation, this book reveals how early Protestant ideals of masculinity were intricately tied to broader religious, political, and cultural changes that reshaped Europe. By placing Luther within the wider context of religious and social transformation, this work offers a fresh perspective on his impact and the changing notions of masculinity in the early modern period. The Making of a Reformation Man is a valuable resource for scholars and students of the Reformations and gender theory, as well as readers interested in the broader implications of religious thought on societal roles and identity.

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Within the Book of Job, Elihu is one of the most diversely evaluated characters. For example, are Elihu’s speeches so insignificant he’s absolutely ignored afterward, or do they actually form an introduction to the speeches of the LORD? What are we to make of Elihu?

Find out as we speak with Cooper Smith about his recent monograph, Allusive and Elusive: Allusion and the Elihu Speeches of Job 32-37. Smith helpfully approaches the speeches of Elihu by discerning their allusions to previous sections in the Book of Job.

Cooper Smith received his PhD in 2019 at Wheaton College, and is Adjunct Instructor at Trinity Christian College (Palos Heights, IL) and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL).

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In a world where faith and reason are perceived as enemies, this book describes them as companions. Readers of Immigrant on Earth: A Philosopher on the Road to Emmaus (Wipf and Stock, 2025) are invited to travel into the souls of ordinary people and the minds of philosophers and theologians, experience the meekness coming from faith, or attempt to decipher complicated philosophical concepts. This is a book that reveals the human condition of being immigrants: people who apply for entry into the souls of those they encounter.

This is a deeply personal and honest book: it reads like a spiritual, philosophical and theological journal. Octavian Gabor weaves every reading, teaching, music, encounter into a personal spiritual tapestry that helps him span the prosaic, the every day and the sublime. He helps us look deeper into human relationships and into the hidden recesses of reality in order to discern the unseen presence of God.

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Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia, the theological concept of spiritual transformation, can be read as a form of neo-homophobia that coaxes change in the queer individual.

In Singapore, Christian discourses of sex and sexuality have materialised in the form of testimonials that detail the pain and suffering of homosexuality, and how Christianity has been a salve for the tribulations experienced by the storytellers. This book freshly engages with Michel Foucault's posthumous and final volume of The History of Sexuality by revitalising his work on biblical metanoia to understand it as a form of neo-homophobia. Drawing on Foucauldian critical theory and approaches in discourse studies, it shows how language is at the centre of this particular iteration of neo-homophobia, one that no longer finds value in overt expressions of hate and disdain for those with non-normative sexualities, but relies extensively on seemingly neutral calls for change and transformation in personal lives.
Queer Correctives takes Singapore as a case study to examine neo-homophobic phenomena, but its themes of change and transformation embedded in discourse will be relevant for scholars interested in contemporary iterations of Foucault's concepts of discipline and technologies of the self. Together with interview data from religious sexual minorities in Singapore, it captures a burgeoning form of homophobic discursive practices that eludes mainstream criticism to harm through change and transformation.

About Vincent Pak:

Vincent Pak is Assistant Lecturer at The University of Hong Kong. His work is located in the fields of sociocultural linguistics and linguistic anthropology, where he’s interested in matters of gender, sexuality, and race. His monograph, Queer Correctives, considers the emergence of neo-homophobia in Singapore.

About Pavan Mano:

Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London. He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation (Manchester UP, 2025), interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore.

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India's Nonviolent Freedom Struggle focuses on the Thomas Christians, a group of Christians in South India who waged a nonviolent struggle against European colonization during the politically volatile period of 1599-1799. India's Non-violent Freedom Struggle: The Thomas Christians (1599-1799) (Routledge, 2023) has three related objectives and unique characteristics. First, it offers a comprehensive study of primary sources that scholars have referenced but rarely studied in-depth. Second, it argues that the Thomas Christian narratives provide a unique position to challenge prevalent estimations found in canonical and postcolonial critical discourse on the nation. Third, it considers how an account of a nonviolent struggle by Thomas Christians further complicates received ideas of the postcolonial nation. It sheds light on the often-overlooked contributions of the Thomas Christians in India's nonviolent freedom struggle and challenges readers to reimagine the complex and often contentious relationship between colonizers and colonized. 

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Diaspora churches have a tremendous capacity for mission as they practice their faith in the Western world, yet why do they fail to develop effective strategies to break out of their inwardly locked ministries? Addressing this question, Dr. Mehari Tedla Korcho’s book Ethiopian Diaspora Churches on Mission: An Intergenerational Perspective on Ethiopian Churches in the United States (Langham Academic, 2024) offers a thorough examination of Ethiopian evangelical churches in the United States, encompassing their historical, sociological, and missiological aspects. Drawing attention to the relatively overlooked nature of the 1.5 diaspora generation, those who came to the United States as children, he explores the missional potential of mobilizing the intergenerational context of Ethiopian diaspora church communities. Outlining a familiar narrative found in many diaspora churches, Dr. Korcho provides comprehensive, strategic recommendations for helping the first, second, and 1.5 generations of these communities engage in mission together. This work offers a fresh perspective to the field of diaspora mission studies through expounding the prospective impact of mission by the diaspora and the challenges faced in establishing missional partnerships

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