The Immanent Frame

The latest issue of Dissent features an argument (sub. req.) by Austin Dacey and Colin Koproske against the prevailing understanding of religious freedom in recent U.S. jurisprudence and, more generally, against the accommodation of claims on the grounds that they derive from a specifically religious belief and not otherwise.

Spencer Ackerman, at Wired‘s Danger Room blog, reports on the recommended reading on Islam provided to incoming FBI agents, as well as other documents obtained by the ACLU and the Asian Law Caucus pursuant to a recent FOIA request.

Earlier this year, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, a former adjunct professor at King’s College, wrote an exposé for Killing the Buddha on the small Evangelical and—at least in the eyes of its authorities, if not in those of all of its students—politically conservative college housed in New York’s Empire State Building. Now, Andrew Marantz, of New York Magazine, takes a closer look at D’Souza’s tenure, the college’s sense of its vocation, and the student body being trained to become, in D’Souza’s words, “dangerous Christians.”

Secularism and Nonreligion, the “world’s first journal dedicated to the study of the nonreligious and the secular,” recently announced its launch and is now accepting submissions.

On July 29—one week from today—the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom will host The Interplay between Religious Freedom, Extremism, and Security: Implications for U.S. Policy, which will feature a panel discussion among Ziya Meral, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, and Monica Duffy Toft.

Meghan O’Gieblyn, writing for Guernica, forays into the history of CCM, or Christian contemporary music, which also happens to be that of her own adolescence, tracing the gradual displacement of the more overtly gospel elements of Christian pop, rock, and rap, as the Christian music industry, in its growing drive for “relevance,” felt the squeeze of secular music, especially under the pincers the more profitable and marketing-savvy MTV. More than the fate of explicitly Christian popular music, this course, O’Gieblyn suggests, reflects the simultaneous devolution of a distinctly evangelical way of being in the world, which, stuck as it is between oppositional self-cloistering and secularizing dissipation, seems to O’Gieblyn to have tended toward to the latter.

On October 13-15, the Centre for Area Studies, University of Leipzig, will hold its second annual conference, Multiple Secularities and Global Interconnectedness.

From Fortress Press, an interview with Mark Lewis Taylor, author of The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Fortress, 2011).

In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Hartmut Rosa hears the echoes of Pink Floyd in the work of Charles Taylor.

Kevin Drum, of Mother Jones, reports on a study conducted by the esteemed researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine that purports to demonstrate the positive, long-term personal and social effects of psilocybin mushrooms, including greater awareness of, and openness to, the spiritual and the sacred.