Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue in 2025! After a record-breaking rise in readership in 2024, we decided to start this year by focusing on a central theme at The Revealer: to understand our world, we must understand religion. This theme actually permeates all of The Revealer’s issues and podcast episodes. But we wanted to start 2025 by making that point explicit. In order to make sense of our political situation, many of our laws, our cultural pressures, our healthcare, and so much more, we must make religion central to our analysis. Creating a more just world depends on it.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

To make this point clear, our February issue looks at places where we might not always think religion is a significant factor. The issue opens with Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst’s “All Aboard the Orphan Train,” where they explore how deeply religious the adoption industry is in the United States and how much of it supports white Christian nationalism. From there, we turn to another aspect of family life that does not get enough attention: connections between domestic abuse and religion. In “The Hindu Way of Life and Divorce,” Gargi Sen writes about the deep cultural and religious obstacles she faced as a South Asian Hindu woman when she wanted to divorce her abusive husband. Then, we turn to a different sphere of society: college student protests. As we highlighted back in summer 2024, the college encampments and protests against the war in Gaza were full of religion. Here, in “Against War: The Mysterious Death of a Student Protestor,” David Griffith investigates a student from Notre Dame who mysteriously died more than 50 years ago and reflects on what that student’s activism and death reveal about today’s campus protests and universities’ entanglements with corporations and the government. Next, we turn to another area people rarely associate with religion: dance. In “The Sacred Steps of Ecstatic Dance,” Kathryn Dickason and Rashida Alisha Hagakore explore ecstatic dance, a movement sprawling across the globe that attracts thousands of people who are often religiously unaffiliated but nevertheless interested in having communal, spiritual experiences.

Our next articles consider religion in more recognizable places, but where people have also experienced religious trauma that seeps into other aspects of life. In “The Resurrection of Todd Bentley,” Elena Trubea chronicles the rise, fall, redemption, and fall again of a popular religious leader to consider why people forgave him despite his lies and misconduct, and what that reveals about conservative Christian culture in the United States. And then, in “The Questioning Embrace of Doubt and Faith,” Robert Monson offers a review of the book Knock at the Sky by Liz Charlotte Grant (author of this viral article about evangelical leader Elisabeth Elliot and her disturbing third marriage) and reflects on how ex-evangelicals and others who no longer believe what they were taught about the Bible might use their doubt to find meaning in the biblical text alongside scientific and other knowledge.

The February issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion Is Everywhere and Why That Matters.” Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst join us to discuss how religion shapes everything from our calendars to our healthcare systems and our laws. We explore how religion influences our daily lives even if we are not religious. We also consider how we fail to address social injustices if we don’t account for religion. And, we discuss what we should do to help bring about a more just society once we begin to recognize how religion is everywhere. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

I am sure 2025 already feels like a tumultuous and uncertain year for many of you. Between changes in the U.S. federal administration to the horrors of the climate crisis, these first weeks of the year have highlighted vulnerability and fears about the future. I shall not offer easy answers to these profound problems. But I can promise that The Revealer will continue to provide insights about religion’s place in these substantial issues. And with such knowledge, we can gain a more complete picture of what’s at play and how to address it with the hope that we can make the future better than our present.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.