popular culture

As quack-ish doctors and bold religious repackaging goes, Couric’s reincarnation episode doesn’t seem so bad.

The protection of religious believers’ feelings has been enshrined in the Russian Civil Code for quite some time, but making it a criminal offense to insult the feelings of religious believers could bring with it much harsher penalties.

God smacks this world.

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.

Punk rockers in Myanmar are gaining international attention for publicly denouncing Buddhist monks’ genocidal treatment of Muslim minorities.

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.

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.

In which the author of a new Jesus bio repeatedly addresses his Muslim background.

One senses that in Brooks’ reading of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age the principle of choice becomes its own form of transcendence.

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.”