My article, “Outposts in the Wilderness: Post-Evangelical Feminist Communities on Digital Media, 2004-2024” is out with Religion and American Culture.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

So excited for my colleague @khansonwoodruff.bsky.social — who just started her new role as Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School — and her fall course, Celebrity and Charisma in American Christianity!

It’s going to be such a fantastic class.

Garamond is the font that gently places the syllabus in your hands and whispers, “You won’t understand me now. But one day, you will.”

Garamond doesn’t care if you miss the deadline. Garamond is the deadline.

It’s not illegible—it’s just emotionally unavailable.
(written in Garamond, obviously)

The Scopes trial turns 100 this month. Kelsey Hanson Woodruff writes about the legacy of the Scopes trial in Dayton, TN, and how one resident, Rachel Held Evans, tried to push evangelicalism beyond Young Earth creationism's culture war battle lines.
www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiou...

(fin.) Then, the “melting pot” was no benign metaphor. Ford’s ritual shows it as a mechanism of erasure and remaking—transforming diverse human lives into standardized, compliant bodies suited to his vision of America: efficient, productive, and stripped of remembered pasts.

(4) Ford called it education and uplift, but it was production and erasure. Migrants’ pasts were submerged to forge identities matching industrial and national ideals, into someone America would accept. Redemption meant conformity, not grace; uniformity, not shared belonging or dignity.

(3) This mirrored Ford’s assembly line logic. Raw materials enter, uniform products exit. Immigrants too were treated as inputs—visible difference processed into standardized, legible, disciplined workers for American industrial modernity and control. And belonging required ritual purification.

(2 )The ceremony docked the “ship” at Ellis Island. Each man held a sign naming his homeland—“Italy,” “Syria,” “India.” Entering in peasant clothes, they disappeared into the pot and reappeared as suited “Americans,” ready for Ford’s factory and civic respectability.

On July 4, 1917, Henry Ford’s English School held its graduation. Immigrant workers in native dress descended from a mock steamship into a giant cauldron marked “Melting Pot” and emerged in suits, waving US flags. Assimilation staged as public ritual.

Credit: The Henry Ford Collection, THF106481

Harvard Kennedy School announced backup plans in case it can't host international students: new and returning international students would be able to study remotely, with an option to attend the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy to finish their Harvard degrees.

Harvard Kennedy School announced backup plans in case it can't host international students: new and returning international students would be able to study remotely, with an option to attend the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy to finish their Harvard degrees.

Took with joy, sent with love, and strategically deployed during your wifi blackout.

It’s official — @historianca.bsky.social and I are moving to Charlottesville! I’m so excited to start a new job as an Advising Fellow at UVA, advising and teaching students as they start their college experience under the leadership of the wonderful @meirazk.bsky.social

Thanks so much, Tom, for the warm words!

This has been the hardest week I've had since coming to Harvard. But then these books arrived, one by one, like gifts. They reminded me why I study, why I’m here, and what still calls me forward.

Grateful for the scholarship and spirit of @tomtweed.bsky.social, @judithweisenfeld.com,& Gordon Chang.

I’m thrilled that my new book from @yalepress.bsky.social was officially published this week. Thanks to all the students, colleagues, archivists, and librarians who helped along the way.

Congrats Chanhee Heo on receiving a postdoctoral fellowship from the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis!! So excited to see the vital scholarship Chanhee will continue to bring to conversations on race, religion, and migration across the Pacific.

Please join the opening event of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s new exhibition “Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories through the Archives.”

Erika Lee, Eunsong Kim, and Shaina Lu will be talking with the curator Victor Betts.

April 22, 2025 (Tuesday), 4PM ET

RSVP here 👇

W o w, w h a t a n h o n o r

So thrilled to host 2025 Spring Harvard Study of Religion Book Talk with Melissa Borja (U. Michigan) for her multi-awarding-winning book, Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change.

📅 Wednesday, April 16

🕔 5:00–6:30 PM

📍 Thomson Room at Barker Center

So thrilled to host 2025 Spring Harvard Study of Religion Book Talk with Melissa Borja (U. Michigan) for her multi-awarding-winning book, Follow the New Way: American Refugee Resettlement Policy and Hmong Religious Change.

📅 Wednesday, April 16

🕔 5:00–6:30 PM

📍 Thomson Room at Barker Center

7. Ultimately, the respondent’s unconstitutional and unlawful actions constitute a severe betrayal of public trust and are considered grave violations that cannot be tolerated from a constitutional perspective.