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In both Israel and India, religious rituals governing purity and health are clashing with efforts to stop the “swine flu” virus from spreading and killing more citizens.

Forty years ago, Indian militants, as they were then named, occupied the island of Alcatraz. In their memory, our writer reflects on both the bloody history of the first Thanksgiving, and the remarkable, enduring power of tribal tradition to create spiritual sustenance in the modern world.

Columnist Dan Gilgoff, in reporting on the conflict between gays and ex-gay ministries, forgets that there are, in fact, happy, healthy, gay Christians.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, visionary anthropologist, once said: “The world began without man and will end without him.” Was he post-humanist? Post-monotheist? Such binaries can’t capture a thinker of his subtlety.

The latest generation of religion scholars has studied Lévi-Strauss only to distance itself from his theories, and to challenge the myth of structuralism. Perhaps in doing so we have created a fable of our own.

By slipping into religious language, and evoking “conscience clause” exemptions, it’s becoming clear that this underground movement is readying itself for the mainstream.

With the Obama administration’s renewed support for immigration reform, and new support from conservative Christian leaders, immigrants’ rights activists are looking toward real progress—and their vision is supported by recent scholarship in the intersection of religion and immigration.

The etymological ethnic bias of the phrase “going Muslim,” used to refer to the massacre at Fort Hood, is as damaging as it is inaccurate.

While the Catholic Church is touting its warm welcome to conservative Anglicans, it’s also a simple union of those who reject gay and women’s ordination.

An NYU professor suggests in Forbes that we refer to tragedies like the one at Ft. Hood as “Going Muslim.” An NYU alumnus, himself a Muslim, finds himself shocked, not so much by the article, as by the response of the school administration.