Watch video clips from "Islam, Human Rights, and the Secular," hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, and read a transcript of the entire exchange between Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na'im here.

Marc Kaufman discusses the attention paid by a recent Vatican council to the possibility of life beyond Earth.

At The Nation, John Nichols criticizes the media's immediate focus on, and negative portrayal of, Major Malik Nadal Hasan's religion following the soldier's assault last week at Fort Hood.

The Economist writes about the recent move towards environmentalism by many religious groups and individuals.

The New York Times responds to charges of an anti-Catholic bias.

It goes without saying that when the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month, it had a profound impact on how we imagined the world around us. At the sci-fi blog io9, Chanda Phelan shows that the event also changed the imaginings of apocalyptic fiction.

In the New York Times, columnist David Brooks points to a "national rush to therapy" in explaining the recent shooting spree by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. In the interest of political correctness, he claims, people resistedthe mounting evidence that Hasan was in fact a zealot motivated by a deadly religious narrative.

In the Los Angeles Times, Edmund Sanders reports on Mt. Kenya's steadily diminishing ice cap.  Beyond the obvious environmental impact of the melting ice cap (which sits atop Africa's second tallest peak), the destruction represents a blow to the faith of the many Kenyans who worship the mountain.

At this past week's American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal, approximately 4,500 scholars, students, journalists, and exhibitors from around the world gathered to share their research, ogle newly-published volumes,and trade professional gossip over hors d'oeuvres.

At Call & Response, Mark Chavez draws upon an April 2008 article by Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski to explain why fewer black congregations tend to have websites than predominately white congregations.