Social Science Research Council

Harvey Cox and E.J. Dionne, two luminaries of American progressive Christianity, will be discussing Cox’s The Future of Faith tonight at WNYC’s Greene Space in lower Manhattan.

At Big Think, an interview with Cornel West on renewing a sense of value over above the merely chrematistic.

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.

At TPMCafe, Daniel Levy reviews the Obama administration’s efforts to-date in confronting Israel-Palestine conflict.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Kurzman discusses the demonization of social scientists and their work in post-revolutionary Iran, and its intensification in the wake of this summer’s civic upheaval. The other side of this story is the fact that, as Kurzman notes, the work of social and political theorists such as Max Weber andJürgen Habermas has found an eager, though not uncritical audience, among many Iranian students and citizens.

Religion Dispatches interviews Anna L. Peterson, author of Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire.

Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan warns against taking yesterday’s shooting at Fort Hood as cause for increased suspicion and vilification of Muslim-Americans.

At the Scoop, guest blogger (and Immanent Frame contributor) Courtney Bender discusses the New York Times‘ perennial waffling about religion, and appeals not only for more probing questions about the place of religion in contemporary public life, but for greater reflexivity in answering them, as well.

In the Guardian, Nathan Coombs reflects on the ascendancy in British politics of “red Toryism,” a new configuration of conservative thinking that derives, in large part, from the “radical orthodox” theology of John Milbank.

In the London Review of Books, philosopher Thomas Nagel reviews Galen Strawson’s Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics.