A Church With a Hole In Its Heart: An Excerpt from Peter Manseau’s “One Nation Under Gods”
In the dry red soil of Chimayo, New Mexico, there is a hole in the…
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Karen Armstrong, Caped Anti-Anti-Muslim Crusader?
When a friend recently saw me carrying around a galley of Karen Armstrong’s latest book Fields…
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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 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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Enlightenment’s Islam: A “Necessary Fiction”
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.
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Inventing “Jihad”
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.”
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U. of Colorado Appoints “Scholar of Conservative Thought”
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.
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Great White Men, Again?: On Lincoln and Our Civil Religion
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?
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David Barton: Falling from Grace?
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.
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