For a brief moment in 2007, news of a hit Iranian television series, whose Farsi title was translated variously as…
Beyond denial
media
O tedious selfhood, O aftertaste of splinters
It’s striking to me how often, with what little resistance, the many scholarly forums this book has now generated have…
CFP: Knight Grants for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life
A new grants program for journalists, sponsored by the Knight Program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism:…
Spirituality: what remains?
To use the concept of spirituality analytically is enormously difficult. There comes a point in reading this book when one…
“The hegemony of her sway”
Oprah’s “gift is not her interviewing strategy but her confessional promiscuity.” While claiming only to tell you what she herself…
NPR’s religion reporters are not anti-religious
Last month, conservative trickster James O'Keefe caught NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller saying this: "The current Republican Party, particularly the…
The future of Haaretz (and of Israel)
David Remnick, in The New Yorker, profiles Amos Schocken, the prickly but principled (albeit ideologically nonconformist) publisher of Haaretz, which,…
A Muslim revolution in Egypt
News organizations reporting on Egypt in the last two and half weeks have repeatedly raised the specter of the Muslim…
Egyptian revolution round-up
For the eighteen days that tens of thousands of Egyptians were rallying to push strongman Hosni Mubarak ever closer to…
Debating religion and media
The latest issue of Social Anthropology (sub. req.) contains a debate on religion and media between Charles Hirschkind and Matthew…