Religion Dispatches
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.
Read More
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 MoreIn which the author of a new Jesus bio repeatedly addresses his Muslim background.
Read More
When we read of Enlightenment efforts to rehabilitate the image of Islam alongside the fact that outgoing Rep. Michele Bachmann raised more than $1 million in 25 days from a Muslim-themed witch hunt, it’s easy to ask how such openness could curdle into such paranoia. But that would be too simple.
Read More
Last week, in the wake of Russian-led investigation, it was reported that when Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in Russia he was, in fact, more eager to wage war than the Islamist contacts he had traveled to find. Accounts reveal that he arrived in Russia with “an avid interest in waging jihad.”
Read More
The irony is that the hire seems a mirror-image mimicking of what conservatives typically allege of the university hiring process: that only liberals/radicals, regardless of scholarly accomplishment, need apply.
Read More
After the emotion evoked by the film subsides, sober consideration begins here: why, in the supposedly “post-racial” age of Obama, is there no space in movies to imagine the historical story of African Americans creating the conditions of their own emancipation?
Read More
On Thursday, Barton’s publisher Thomas Nelson announced that it would pull from publication The Jefferson Lies. “In the course of our review,” the publisher said that it had “learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported,” and that “because of these deficiencies” it was “in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution” of the work.
Read More
Top 8 RD stories on religion and the use and abuse of history in U.S. political life.
Read More“Being a Christian scholar is first and foremost about getting the facts right and it should not be about trying to make an historical figure match your religious and political views or agenda. Sloppy and misleading historical writing used for advancing an agenda harms the general reputation of Christians as scholars.”
Read More