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Sex, secularism, and Islamists.

Santorum banking on the Duggars.

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.

The mega-pastor’s views on evolution don’t seem to be evolving.

Our religious traditions remind us that it’s often those at the edges who speak the truth most clearly.

In a relatively unprecedented move, Greek police arrested the Rector of the thousand-year-old Vathipedi Monastery, Father Ephraim, on Christmas Eve. He had just returned to the Monastery, which is located on the most sacred ground in all of Orthodox Christendom, which we have now discovered to be the only semi-autonomous region of Mount Athos.

Is the NYPD Hizzoner’s private army?

Time magazine’s religion top ten list had Mormonism in the spotlight. The Religion Newswriters Association voted Osama bin Laden’s death (and the faith response to it) their number one story in a list that included Harold Camping, Rob Bell, and Mississippi ’ s Personhood initiative. Oh, and the top religion author of 2011? Tim Tebow, whose life story is a runaway bestseller for our friends at HarperOne. But what about the stories that shoulda been, but weren ’t ? We ’ re thinking this list, drawn up Peter Laarman, might provide a template for 2012 coverage. — The Eds.

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.