At Religion Dispatches, Richard Ricketts interviews Sharon Nepstad, a sociologist of religion whose new book, Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement, explores the nearly 30-year history of the Catholic anti-war group.

Patheos, a site devoted to "global dialogue about religion and spirituality," which launched last year, is now partnering with On Faith for a contest that asks college students to make and submit videos about their religious faith and practice.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new phenomenon that is beginning to gain attention and grow: humanist chaplains on college campuses.

K.L. Noll begins his recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a relatively uncontroversial clarification of what the academic study of religion represents. He then, however, goes on to insist that theology, while potentially academic, does not actually advance knowledge.

In the Boston Review, Tara McKelvey reports on the hope of Veterans Affairs administrators that religious faith could be a replacement for costly psychiatric care for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

At altmuslim, Raouf Ebeid asks why, "when we see more progressive attitudes about women emerging in the presumably more conservative Gulf countries, do we see the opposite trend in countries like Egypt, whose capital Cairo was once considered 'Paris on the Nile'?" Such counter-intuitive developments, Ebeid continues, can be chalked up to the differing economic trajectories of Middle Eastern states, as well as, relatedly, to the varying degrees of emphasis placed by their respective governments on education.

In the National Post, Charles Lewis writes about those who would use Christianity to justify high salaries.

Beliefnet's Idol Chatter blog rounds up recent conversations surrounding the marketing of the film "The Road" to evangelically-inclined Christian churches. Based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, the apocalyptic film follows a father and son through a world made bleak and barren by an unspecified cataclysm.

Despite my conviction that it is best, in general, to avoid posting Palin-related news items, I want to highlight this post by Matt Yglesias. Following Palin's comments to the effect that Israeli settlement expansion needs to be not curtailed, but accelerated, Yglesias reflects on the millennial sources of such policies.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses Judge David Hamilton and his involvement in the fight over God's properly secular name.