Join the Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas and its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, for a discussion about Demsas’s new book, On the Housing Crisis. The conversation will take place at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, in Washington, D.C., 610 Water Street SW, on September 3 at 7 p.m.
As Dorothy Fortenberry noted in an essay for us this week, “We live in a strange moment when religion remains a powerful force in American public life even as churchgoing declines precipitously.” Citing a new Louisiana law mandating that schools display the Ten Commandments, Fortenberry asks if such breaches of Church-state separation are a sign of Christianity’s strength in the culture or its weakness—a kind of “last-ditch attempt to get the government to do the work once accomplished by Sunday school.”
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
How did the United States come to this crossroads, in which…