The Journal of Religion & Society is a peer-reviewed, cross-disciplinary, electronic journal published by the Kripke Center for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University.
The journal promotes the study of religious groups and beliefs among various peoples, past and present, with special emphasis on American religions and Western religious traditions.
The journal is open-access and freely allows users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of all published material for all lawful purposes.
Citation:
Author’s Name, “Title of the Article,” Journal of Religion & Society 28 (2026), cited pages [URL of the Table of Contents page].
Religious socialization by parents, which encourages religious participation and affiliation, as well as family upbringing, which instills values like educational success, hard work, resilience, and respect, shape the everyday lives of second-generation Africans. This shaping influence remains central to ongoing scholarly debates, particularly in light of the growth of Pentecostal Christianity within African diaspora communities. Focusing on second-generation Nigerians, this paper explores the role of Christian faith in everyday life within multicultural Britain, thereby contributing to the wider debate on the religion and minority identity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and diaries written by a sub-sample of participants, this study finds that Christian faith offers guidance and influences participation and settlement among second-generation Nigerians in Britain. Religious lessons provide tools for understanding and drawing intra-racial and inter-racial boundaries, while values like patience, tolerance, and good sociability help individuals manage workplace racism, build broad interracial networks, and progress socioeconomically.
This paper explores the multifunctional roles of the Porta Mariae, a neoclassical arch built in Naga City, Philippines, in 2010 to mark 300 years of devotion to Our Lady of Peñafrancia. Beyond its devotional purpose, the monument serves as a civic landmark, cultural symbol, and political project. Using a qualitative case study approach—a combination of field observation, resident and pilgrim interviews, archival research, and digital ethnography—this study identifies five core functions: religious threshold, civic marker, collective memory anchor, participatory urban space, and product of church-state collaboration. Framed by theories of sacred space (Durkheim, Eliade), collective memory (Halbwachs, Nora), and the social production of space (Lefebvre), the analysis argues that religious monuments are dynamic, shaping spiritual, social, and spatial identities. The Porta Mariae illustrates how contemporary religious architecture continues to mediate between sacred devotion and civic life in modern Philippine society.
At the joint between religion and society, pastors must function in both domains and reconcile the two when necessary. As an example, this article follows the life of Howard Haines, an American Protestant pastor trained in the New York ecumenical/evangelical tradition of the early 1900s, whose sixty years of pastoring threaded through war and peace, the North and the South, the United States and abroad. The discussion highlights the formation of his key commitments to social action, particularly in bridging racial, class, and cultural divides. More broadly, the article attends to the nature of durability in pastoral values and commitments, durability that may seem at times to fade, yet later reappear. The article also underlines the methodological importance of having full biographical details of a pastor’s life, including materials that reflect both a pastor’s formal public statements (such as sermons and newspaper articles) and a pastor’s more private reckonings of personal and pastoral life (such as journals and correspondence).
Discursivities around migration have always shaped and defined the Kerala imaginary. Notwithstanding, there have not been any substantial engagements with Kerala’s rather deep history of internal migration. The Malabar migration that witnessed the large-scale movement of people from Travancore to British Malabar between the 1920s and 1970s is largely seen as a peasant migration incurred by the severe socio-economic conditions, including poverty and the Second World War. A notable specificity of the migration was the high composition of Syrian Christians among the peasants. To critically problematize this community specificity, this article closely analyses Vinoy Thomas’s novel Karikkotatakary (2014). This article argues that Malabar migration could be viewed as an instantiation of the Syrian Christian community’s assertion and contends further that Vinoy Thomas deploys Dalit Christianity as a critical pointer to respond to these latent historicities of Malabar migration, serving as a critique of Syrian Christian religiosity and community consciousness.
Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) kindred banners, hof district banners, and crests/coats of arms strategically combine Germanic symbolism with medieval heraldic tradition and motifs to assert an ideological narrative that presents and claims: (1) cultural legitimacy; (2) historical continuity to European history and mythology; and (3) a distinct ethnic identity. This effort at visual piety is not mindless but deliberate collective memory construction imbued with political identity meaning(s). Heraldic symbolism in this case: (1) attempts to legitimize AFA mythic conceptualizations of ancestral bloodline and claims to an Aryan identity; (2) represents a form of banal nationalism; (3) signals white European identity to others; and (4) functions as a tool for collective organization and community building and formation.
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