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Sex, secularism, and Islamists.

Sociologists often talk about making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I’d be happy if readers came away from the book seeing dieting as more complicated, and more problematic, than they had previously thought and efforts at sexual reorientation more akin to popular self-help culture than they would assume. If evangelical readers found Christian practices somewhat strange and non-Christian readers found them oddly familiar, that would be great too.

Over the past couple years, religionistas of all sorts have attempted to navigate a new media landscape in which old constructions of religious authority, identity, affiliation, and practice are changing almost by the minute.

On the conflation of deities.

In their new book, Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future, Gary Macy, William T. Ditewig, and Phyllis Zagano revisit the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate in the Roman Catholic Church. Unlike ordination to the priesthood, women’s ordination to the diaconate has unambiguous roots in the Christian New Testament, where Phoebe is named as a deacon of the church.

What do Pope Benedict XVI and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have in common? They both have a thing for Krampus.

Despite a media blackout on the killing of Shaykh Emad, who refused to see the protests as illegitimate rebellion, Twitter and Facebook were on fire with expressions of sadness and outrage.

If I were CEO of Trinity Wall Street, I’d be alarmed at the idea of the “unspecified use” apparently demanded by the OWS protesters. But, of course, Trinity Wall Street does not have a CEO, it has ministers.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, people have considered which religious figures would or would not be joining the drum circle at their local Occupy encampment, were they alive today. Jesus? Ghandi? But what about other religious figures? A religion-nerdy parlor game…

Film premieres tonight in Des Moines.