A new blog on religion and the 2008 election campaign has been launched by the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford. The blog, called Spiritual Politics, features outside contributors as well as members of the Greenberg Center staff.     

Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center and professor of religion in public life, inaugurated the blog in early December. “The idea is to provide daily tracking of the way religion seems to be enhancing, disturbing, and otherwise interacting with the 2008 election cycle,” Silk explains. “We are trying to do this in a reasonably non-partisan way, though not without attitude.”     

Among those joining Silk on the blog are such well-known commentators on religion in American public life as John Green, Jan Shipps, Gary Dorrien, and Jerome Chanes. Recent postings cover everything from Mitt Romney’s speech on religion and politics to Barack Obama’s appeal to religious voters, to the ways Mike Huckabee’s religious populism has unsettled the Republican establishment.     

“This election season, the Democrats have deciding that faith matters a whole lot while Republicans are trying to figure out exactly how much it should matter,” Silk says. “It’s a great time for a student of religion in America to be alive and blogging.”          

Silk sees the blog as a complement to the Center’s thrice-annual magazine, Religion in the News. “The magazine gives us an opportunity to step back and trace the trajectory of religion news,” he says. “But there’s so much going on, it’s important to be able to catch it on the fly.”     

For more information on www.Spiritual-Politics.org, Religion in the News, or the Greenberg Center, call 1-860-297-2353, or email csrpl@trincoll.edu.