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The religious composition of the United States is rapidly shifting. As institutions and their stakeholders negotiate the needs of an increasingly diverse public, leaders of national chaplaincy organizations offer insight into how actors can effectively understand and engage matters of religious pluralism. This article identifies two distinct institutional frameworks ("mandate" and "interpersonal care") that provide chaplaincy leaders with different schemas, tools, and strategies to use when understanding and motivating their engagement with religiously diverse publics. Using interviews with sixteen national chaplaincy leaders working in public and private settings, we delineate how institutional leaders interpret, articulate, and fulfill their roles as negotiators of religious differences within their respective frameworks. Our findings allow scholars and leaders to better understand how institutions and their actors can successfully interact with a diversifying, religiously pluralistic public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamic of American religious pluralism contains at its core a spatial politics configured by a longstanding pattern of Anglo-Protestant dominance coupled with a widespread though tension-filled acceptance of religious pluralism. This dynamic has been particularly dramatic and intense since the 1960s because of an increase in the numbers of adherents of non-Protestant and non-Western religions in the United States and an increase in the degree to which religious groups have sought a more active and visible involvement in American life. One can observe the American pluralist dynamic functioning spatially at three interlocking levels—regional, local, and national—with spatial politics playing out differently in different locations depending on a variety of factors. As the new century opens, new factors such as globalization, virtual communication, and heterolocalism come increasingly into play. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A spat of recent polls show that Americans are as religious as ever, even if their affiliations to particular faith groups have somewhat faded. Furthermore, during the past two decades, historians of American religion have unearthed much new information, connecting American religion to broader currents of American life in numerous exciting ways. Despite these two events, we argue that religion has yet to become central to the way in which most historians of modern America (since 1865) tell their story—except in areas that are either racialized (the civil rights movement) or considered to be politically marginal (the New Right). Religion is everywhere in history, but nowhere in mainstream historiography. We explore some possible reasons for this fact, and then conclude by pointing out several directions in which religious history is currently moving, and in which an examination by mainstream scholars might benefit the field as a whole tremendously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses religious pluralism as an academic, civic, and theological challenge. Looking at religious communities in their connections and interrelations is a critical academic challenge for students of religion who would gain insight into the dynamics of religious life and identities today. The encounter of people from different religious traditions in hometown America has reshaped the context of religious life, calling for attention and serious study. In short, the study of a complex city like Fremont, CA, might well be the study of today's Silk Road, today's convivencia. Religious pluralism is also a critical civic issue for citizens of increasingly diverse societies, raising fundamental questions about the nature of civic polity, the "we" of our civic life. And, to be sure, religious pluralism is a critical theological issue for people of faith, raising fundamental questions about one's own faith in relation to the religious other. Scholarly, civic, and theological issues have their own distinctive realms of discourse and require us to think carefully about the meaning of "voice" in our work. We cannot evade the question of voice in thinking theoretically about pluralism, for diversity is not only the characteristic of the worlds we study but of our own identities, our multiply-situated selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to situate Orthodox Christianity within the context of American religious pluralism in the twenty-first century. It explores the role of Orthodox Christianity, as both subject and object, in the evolution of American religious identity, with particular focus on the domestic, international, and transnational factors that account for the locus of Orthodox Christianity in debates about the religious dimensions of collective identity in America. The article concludes that internal pluralization is redefining the identity and mission of Orthodox Christianity in America, such that the consolidation of a distinct type of American Orthodoxy may allow for a renegotiation of the place of Orthodox Christianity in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]