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.
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 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.”
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.
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.
