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“I wanted to write a book that looked at what happened when you forced individuals and communities, as well as the environment, to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The best way to do this was to go to the nation’s sacrifice zones, those poorest pockets of the country that had been exploited first, to show what happens when you allow the marketplace to rule.”

“I’d feel most comfortable assigning myself to the category of people who prefer not to be assigned to categories,” a fifty-something, Silicon Valley entrepreneur I’ll call Nathan* joked when I asked him how he’d describe his religious identification or affiliation. “But I suppose ‘none’ will do.”

Obama supporters should “chill out” in the face of this swiftboating via the conflation of Obama and Wright into an undifferentiated brown blob of black radicalism broadcast together in a twenty-four hour news cycle.

I’m not here to kvetch about the adaptation of a landmark book into film. That is boring. And I really enjoyed On the Road the movie, which features some truly inspired casting, excellent performances all around, and a much stronger integration of the writer’s voice with the action of the film than, for example, the somewhat clunky Howl. What I am interested in is the way in which On the Road’s spiritual essence has been diluted.

Sunando Sen’s death was more than a case of mistaken identity.

I hate to break it to you, but Noah’s Flood is not a real thing. As geologist David Montgomery wrote in his recent history, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, the religious idea that the Flood was real has been to the actual history of geology as a science. But by now, however, science knows better. I can’t say as much for the media.

Last year’s big LGBT religion stories will get bigger in 2013.

Religion writers, both journalists and scholars, have had much to say of late about the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated—especially given the impact of so-called “ Nones” in the recent presidential election. But much of what’s been written fails to highlight finer distinctions among Nones. So how to better understand this fast-approaching tipping point in American religion and spirituality?

There is no justification; there is no larger logic, no theologically exposed silver lining. This misery is all too human—the imposition of an individual’s twisted will on others with deadly consequences. Appeal to God doesn’t fix this; it doesn’t explain it.

Almost half of the world’s countries have laws or policies that penalize blasphemy, apostasy, contempt of religion, or religious “hate speech.”