Gregory S. Paul, an independent scholar who made a name for himself in secularist circles with a 2005 Journal of Religion and Society article about correlations between religion and social health, has a new article out in the journal Evolutionary Psychology that draws links between "popular religion" and "dysfunctional psychosocial conditions" (pdf).

Senior New Republic editor Jonathan Chait assails the the religion of Rand, evidently one of the fastest growing confessions in the United States today.

Dimi Reider writes in the Guardian that, much to the chagrin of organizations promoting a vision of purified cultural and territorial Jewish nationalism, Jewish identity is for many Jews inseparable from life in the diaspora.

At Spiegel Online, Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Daniel Steinvorth report on the wave of homophobia sweeping Islamic countries and the "moral panic" it's creating.

Reporting from the 9/12 rally in Washington D.C. this past weekend, Lisa Lebo pries into the unholy alliance of religious fervor and Reaganomics.

Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought is fielding applications for up to four post-doctoral fellowship positions.

At Experimental Philosophy, Jonathan Livengood blurbs his new paper (co-authored with Justin Sytsma, Adam Feltz, and Edouard Machery) on the type of temperament philosophers tend to have.

In the Guardian, Nick Spencer tries to paint a more complex picture of Charles Darwin's break with Christianity than have some recent accounts, refusing to reduce it to the purely autobiographical any more than the purely scientific.

The New York Times reports that John T. Elson, the Time religion editor who published a controversial 1966 cover story on secularization, has died.

At Sightings, Joshua M. Z. Stanton discusses the value of ethical wills for interreligious dialogue.