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All in Moderation?
I could be frantically live-blogging from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago. I won’t, per se. But in a number of places here I have been hearing lots of talk about religious “extremists” and “moderates.” It goes without saying that nearly all of the thousands of AAR attendees—mostly academics in religious studies…
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Agnostic Machinery
Just released today is the first of what will hopefully be a series of articles of mine about science and religion on Seed magazine’s online edition. “Agnostic machinery,” it’s called. The idea is this: I went and saw the Bill Maher New Atheist movie Religulous (aided by trusty friend Jake), noticed that the religion biologizers…
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Where Went the Ancient Astronauts?
The Smart Set, an excellent web magazine of ideas and things, has just published an article of mine on “ancient astronaut” theory—the idea that all the gods that the ancients believed in were actually extraterrestrials with advanced technology. Ancient astronauts are an old hobby of mine, a delightful mix between my interests in religion and…
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The First Journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus came to me as a birthday present in the beautiful Adirondacks in August. Not till the last couple of weeks, while traveling in Turkey and Jordan, did I get the chance to read it. The timing, as it turned out, was just about perfect. I wouldn’t call it a great…
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Summarizing Jordan
At breakfast overlooking Jordan’s gorgeous Wadi Dhana nature preserve, my companion Mary and I got to talking with an Australian family in the middle of a several months’ tour across the world. The father, an environmental scientist, asked if we had any books in English to swap. He just finished what he had been reading,…
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The New Young Turks
Among the young, jet-setting Turks I’ve met who are interested in Islam, there is a common narrative. I heard it from a successful international book distributor, from a clerk at my hotel, and from a shy university student. You grow up in a family that considered itself Muslim but didn’t really pay much mind to…
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Face to Face
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Ancient Scribbles
A very satisfying day at Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum. As is typical, I got so thoroghly engrossed by the relatively small collection of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that I hardly had energy for the vast halls of pottery and burial monuments from antique Anatolia. Even so, the splendor of the Alexander Sarcophagous from Sidon (as well as…
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Half Asleep in Istanbul
I’ve just arrived in Istanbul, Turkey to begin a little more than two weeks in the Middle East. The mission: an article on science and Islam (plus the unexpected). I’m in a hostel overlooking the Bosphorus with Michael Jackson music videos playing, one after another. It was a spectacularly beautiful day to arrive at a…