The Social Science Research Council's blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere
James Cameron's new blockbuster film Avatar has inspired a flurry of commentary about its theological implications.
Lauren Sandler of DoubleX, noting statistics from the American Religious Identification Survey, asks why women are more likely to believe in God than men, "especially considering how God treats them."
Bruce Russell reviews Paul K. Moser's The Elusive God in Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews.
In Books & Culture, Jason Byassee reviews a trio of books about prisons and their meaning for Christians.
In today's New York Times, Judith Shulevitz reviews The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures by Nicholas Wade.
Citing two recent examples of unusually attentive and nuanced reporting on religion, Nick Street ponders the future of the field and what the absence of Peter Steinfels might mean for it.
For thirty-five years, Garrison Keillor has brought listeners into the village ofLake Wobegon, Minnesota, the “town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve.” An idealized setting for Keillor’s storytelling, it has, until recently, been innocent of overt prejudice. Last...
Looking back at Roger Forster's 2001 Telos essay "Dialectic of Enlightenment as Genealogy Critique," Andrew Walker advocates for the "continued relevance" of Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a new study of "Global Restrictions on Religion." Pew casts the report as the first "quantitative study that reviews an extensive number of sources to measure how governments and private actors infringe on religious beliefs and practices...
In the New York Times Magazine, David Kirkpatrick writes about Robert P. George, one of the architects of the recently-unveiled Manhattan Declaration and a legal scholar who is emerging as a leading voice among Christian conservatives. He is also an outspoken proponent of natural-law reasoning.
In the New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat describes the new movie Avatar as an example of pantheism, "a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world."
At the Huffington Post John O. Voll and John Esposito rebut in no uncertain terms Thomas L. Friedman's most recent New York Times op-ed, which misleadingly claimed broad Muslim support for acts of political violence.
The Economist reviews evolutionary biologist Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures.
At the Guardian, Mervyn Thomas contextualizes the recent Chinese government crackdowns on Christian worship.
Earlier this week we heard about the evangelical backgrounds of public intellectuals Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood. Summarizing a report from Killing the Buddha, Daniel Vaca noted that all three mentioned the influence of the Bible on their habits of reading...
