Faith Angle brings together top scholars and leading journalists for smart conversations around some of the most profound questions in the public square. Rather than a current-events debrief, our goal is a substantive conversation one notch beneath the surface, drawing out how religious convictions manifest themselves in American culture and public life.
Publisher
The Aspen Institute
Category
news · religion & spirituality · society & culture
To comply with a flurry of Executive Orders issued in January, many colleges throughout the country have been renaming, restructuring, or altogether eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming. These DEI initiatives have been divisive for years. Their proponents see them as essential to ensuring fair treatment for minority students and rooting out prejudice in the academy. Their detractors see them as stifling free speech and academic debate. Emma Green, journalist at the New Yorker, and Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America, discuss the genesis of DEI, where it went wrong, and what might replace it in our search to create a flourishing multicultural society.
Links:
What Comes After D.E.I.? by Emma Green
Harvard, Public Trust, and a Warning for the Nonprofit Sector by Eboo Patel
4 Mar 2025
Jon Rauch and Pete Wehner: Christianity and Democracy in America
Journalist Jon Rauch’s smart new book from Yale University Press, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, offers three provocative and insightful essays. Though an outsider to Christianity—as he tells his long-time friend Pete Wehner of the Trinity Forum, Jon is a “gay Jewish atheist born in 1960”—Jon’s new treatise follows a dozen books, and hundreds of articles, covering topics from free inquiry to gay marriage, political realism to happiness, and the constitution of knowledge to matters of American political economy.
The book explores the history and implications of three modes of the Christian faith in America. The first Jon terms Thin Christianity, embodied by mainline Protestantism. The second is Sharp Christianity—really MAGA white evangelicalism, what Jon calls a “fear-based” church.
But the third chapter, Jon makes a case for Thick Christianity, exemplified by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other creative exilic religious minorities who have made peace with the fact of pluralism and the democratic opportunity of compromise and negotiation—the principles James Madison also affirmed. He calls this book a sort of atonement for his past arguments that American society, and its political system, would be better without the influence of religions convictions. What changed for Jon? Partly it was his realizing that religion is a load-bearing wall, in any democracy. But partly it was an emergent friendship with Pete Wehner and with other thinking believers who have enlarged Jon’s vision.
Guests
Jonathan Rauch
Peter Wehner
Additional Resources
“Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy,” by Jonathan Rauch
“Let It Be: Three Cheers for Apatheism” by Jonathan Rauch
"Evangelicals Made a Bad Trade" by Peter Wehner
23 Oct 2024
Brad Fulton and Amber Hacker: Religion & American Philanthropy
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Brad Fulton, professor of Nonprofit Management and Social Policy at the O’Neill School of Public Affairs at Indiana University, alongside Amber Hacker, Chief of External Affairs at Interfaith America. Our guests discuss the role of religious giving in philanthropy and the surprising trends that emerge from the underlying data. Out of the $557 billion dollars given annually in the United States to charities, twenty percent of the funds come from foundations. Does religious commitment influence that giving? Do we know from available data that generosity makes a person healthier or happier? Does the generation a person’s born into—say, a Boomer vs. a Millennial—impact giving patterns? They also discuss new networking tools as it relates to philanthropic giving.
Guests
Dr. Brad Fulton
Amber Hacker
Additional Resources
“Religious Organizations Crosscutting the Nonprofit Sector,” by Brad R. Fulton
“Faith-Based Public Foundations: Identifying the Field and Assessing its Impact,” by Allison Ralph and Brad R. Fulton
“Money, Meet Meaning,” by Amber Hacker and Tom Levinson
Reach and audience
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Apple Podcasts (US)
4.8 / 5
61 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 33 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
32
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
85
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