San Francisco Chronicle: Richard Flory on Newsom and Religion
The San Francisco Chronicle asked Richard Flory how Newsom's religious rhetoric would affect for potential voters. Read More
This is my archive
New Study Examines Faith and Organizing Networks After Los Angeles Wildfires
The Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the Equity Research Institute at USC are partnering to study the reconstruction of the Los Angeles region’s social fabric following the 2025 wildfires. Read More
“We Save Us” – 2025 Trends to Watch in Religion and Society
CRCC 2025 trends focus on the wildfires affecting Los Angeles County and what will be a multi-year recovery effort. Across the various issues, a central theme emerged: Solidarity. Read More
L.A. Times: Najuma Smith on the LAPD Civilian Review Process
“The community has to engage,” she said, because “we’re not heavily represented in this inside process, which actually can be a direct impact on police accountability.” Read More
Roundtable of Faith Leaders and Vice President Kamala Harris on Reproductive Health
Vice President Kamala Harris recently hosted a roundtable with faith leaders on the state of reproductive health care in the United States. CRCC’s Rev. Dr. Najuma Smith-Pollard, assistant director of community and public engagement, delivered the following summative comments at the end of the roundtable. Read More
Alissa Wahid: A Legacy of Transformation in Indonesia
Even so, she channelled her family’s legacy into pioneering an interreligious movement of her own: the Gusdurian Network Indonesia (GNI). Founded in 2010, GNI works with grassroots-level activists across Indonesia to promote interreligious reconciliation, active citizenship, democracy, and human rights. Read More
LA Times: Why Are Christian Groups Allowed To Discriminate? Power and Privilege
To the editor: Op-ed article writers Rachel S. Mikva, Corey D.B. Walker and Reza Aslan are rightly concerned that what passes for religious freedom in the U.S. is highly selective. Yet they seem puzzled as to why this is so. Why, they ask, is religious freedom for some groups favored over other groups, and second, why is the deciding issue always about sexuality and procreation? Read More
Black Female Leadership within LAPD: Untold Stories!
High-ranking African-American female leadership in the Los Angeles Police Department share untold stories of issues around racial equity, internal culture and politics of the LAPD, and being a Black woman in law enforcement in the nation's second-largest city. Read More
Predictions 2021: An Uphill Struggle
As we do around this time each new year, we at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture (CRCC) are going to make some predictions for 2021. Even though the world seems pretty unpredictable of late. Well, actually, that doesn’t sound quite right. It was possible to foresee the political incompetence and malfeasance of the blessedly now-previous presidential administration, an outburst of racially inflected fundamentalist violence, resistance to science and the rise of American fascism. In fact, we predicted these events and phenomena last year, when we saw the early trends of the 2020s mirroring many of the cultural currents of the 1920s. Still, the dismal depth and shocking scope of those forces in 2020 (and the first days of 2021) were beyond our forecasting. Read More
Azza Karam: The Role Of Women In Faith And Diplomacy
That, as Karam tells it, is one of the prime directives of her tenure as RfP Secretary General — to raise up women’s voices within and across religious traditions and see her fellow females not only “take their seat at the table,” but step out in front and lead the way to meaningful change on a range of issues confronting the world today. Read More
