According to recent data from Pew Research Center, nearly 70% of adults in the United States identify with a religious faith or group but only 25% attend religious service weekly. If only one quarter of the population is actively participating in communal worship, have other spaces (both literal and conceptual) emerged where religion-like meaning is ascribed, community is experienced, and sacrality is recognized?

This episode of Religion & explored some of the new spaces and settings where developing community, cultivating sacred experience, and practicing ritual exist outside of houses of worship. It examined the limits of traditional organized religion as well as emerging religious forms.

Host: Brian Steensland

Brian Steensland is Professor of Sociology at Indiana University Indianapolis. His interests span religion, culture, politics, and civic life in the contemporary United States. His books, as author or editor, are Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (Oxford, 2022), The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford, 2014), and the award-winning The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, 2008). His journal articles include “Religion Unbundled” (American Sociological Review), “The Measure of American Religion” (Social Forces), and “Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State” (American Journal of Sociology). Steensland’s current interests revolve around religious experience in both traditional religious institutions and newer manifestations of religion, and choice and commitment in the context of pluralism. Supported by a $1.2M grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., he is leading the Center’s partnership with the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis on a five-year project about religious parenting.

Panelist: Ruth Braunstein

Ruth Braunstein is Director of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she is also an SNF Agora Institute Professor of Sociology. She is most recently the author of My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, winner of the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture. She produced and hosted the audio documentary When the Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, which was named among the 20 best podcasts of 2025 by The Atlantic. She received the inaugural Distinguished Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association’s Religion Section, is Past-President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), and is Chair of the Board of Directors of PRRI.

Panelist: Jaime Kucinskas

Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College. In her research, she examines the many contexts where people experience spiritual states and meaningfulness, as well as the constitutive institutional conditions under which people engage in moral-sensemaking. She is the author of The Mindful Elite, The Loyalty Trap, and co-editor of Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice and Power. Her work has also been published in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, and Sociology of Religion.

Panelist: Amy Lawton

Amy Lawton is Director of Research, Special Projects in the President’s Office at Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests focus on the potential and paradox of religious pluralism in the United States, the cultural production of the sacred, and meaning-making in both religious and (non)religious belief systems. Her dissertation examined the practice of donor memorial ceremonies, which are memorial services held by medical schools to commemorate and honor whole-body anatomical donors.

Show Notes: https://raac.indianapolis.iu.edu/teaching_resources/new-sacred-spaces-show-notes-2/

Teaching Resources: https://raac.indianapolis.iu.edu/teaching_resources/religion-new-sacred-spaces-teaching-resources/