The Immanent Frame

The Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge is accepting applications for six postdoc fellowships in relation to a new project, The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture.

For years, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has been excavating an 11,600-year-old assemblage of carved pillars at Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey. His discoveries, reports Charles C. Mann in National Geographic, are making some question whether it was religion that first prompted humans to settle down and start civilizing themselves.

Thanks to the efforts of sociologist Phil Zuckerman, this fall Pitzer College in California will become the first undergraduate institution in the country to offer a major in secularism, The New York Times reports.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in public school classrooms. Reversing an earlier decision, the court found no evidence that “the display of such a symbol on classroom walls might have an influence on pupils.” All 47 countries of the Council of Europe are obliged to obey the decision.

In The New Republic, Isaac Chotiner reviews Stefan Collini’s latest book, which asks what it means to give offense and to feel offended. It also explores how “offensive” speech ought to be dealt with in the public sphere—a recurring issue whenever liberals criticize, or try to figure out how to respond to criticism of, religious beliefs and practices.

Daniel Mahoney, author of The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, reviewed Olivier Roy’s Holy Ignorance in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

Over at U.S. Intellectual History, Andrew Hartman wants to know why, starting the 1970s, the Christian Right came to see “secular humanism” as a religion in its own right. He writes that we need “an intellectual history of the Christian Right’s critique of secular humanism,” for a number of reasons.

Olivier Roy, writing in the New Statesman, argues that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa show how secular Islam has become in the region.

“January 28th marked a major rupture in Egyptian history: it is the day Egyptians truly broke the fear barrier created by Mubarak’s regime,” SSRC-IDRF fellow Mohamed Elshahed writes. He goes on to discuss how the protesters have overcome Mubarak’s divide-and-rule tactics and brought the country one step closer to realizing its “potential.”

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley spent his first day in office finding out how Christian an elected official can get before causing a scandal.