Just Your Average Teenage Muslim (Shapeshifter) Girl From Jersey
Say hello to Marvel’s latest superhero.
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Katie Couric, Reincarnated
As quack-ish doctors and bold religious repackaging goes, Couric’s reincarnation episode doesn’t seem so bad.
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Reza Aslan’s Viral Fox News Interview Reveals More Than Just Christian Privilege
When FoxNews.com’s Lauren Green repeatedly pressed Reza Aslan, a Muslim, on why he wrote a book on Jesus, she was, without knowing it, putting the role of religious studies scholarship on a grand stage.
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Reza Aslan’s Missed Opportunity
With apologies to Reza Aslan, he is not an unbiased scholar of the historical Jesus, or of the history of Islam, or of any other phenomenon in the study of religion. Nor is any Christian or Jewish scholar, or any liberal or conservative scholar. I just wish he had said so.
Read MoreThe Sacramental American Day of Thanks
Secular holidays, actually constituting a quasi-sacred calendar, span the entire year: From New Year’s Day, the King Holiday, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, and now, at long last, Thanksgiving Day.
Read MoreUpdate: Fox News Tries Gotcha Game with Reza Aslan
In which the author of a new Jesus bio repeatedly addresses his Muslim background.
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My God, David Brooks
One senses that in Brooks’ reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age the principle of choice becomes its own form of transcendence.
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California Inmates Protest the Abuse of Long-Term Solitary Confinement
In US prisons, stays in solitary confinement often exceed years and turn into tens of years. “The reality is stunning,” says Markle Downton, “and it certainly helps to makes sense of why people who are incarcerated in California feel the situation is dire enough that it’s necessary to put their lives on the line to call for reform.”
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Atheist Monument: Proof of Unintelligent Design
The right to erect a monument, for any cause, is an opportunity. It’s a chance to lend dignity and consequence to a public space. A monument is also an aesthetic opportunity. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but a successful monument makes it hard to imagine its setting without it. The American Atheists monument fails on both counts.
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In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”
The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in Uttarakhand right now. Many of the forces that frame daily life in South Asia are suddenly on display like a raw wound: the wages of development and globalization, the power of the natural world, divine agency, altruism, self-interest, and the political nature of both government action and religious ritual.
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