The Immanent Frame

At Washington Monthly, Mariah Blake comments on the ongoing controversy over Texas’s once-in-a-decade revision of its textbook standards. With standards for such subjects as English and science already revised, the current debate centers on Texas’s social studies standards. As Blake notes, textbook battles are “nothing new, especially in Texas.” But the current situation is unique in two ways.

A number of blogs recently have criticized David Brooks for his response to the earthquake in Haiti. Noting that Haiti’s extreme poverty has turned an unexceptional earthquake into a catastrophe of staggering scale, Brooks accounted for Haiti’s poverty by explaining that “Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences.” While Brooks largely blames Haitians themselves for their poverty, his critics look more to structural and historical inequities. Over at Savage Minds, Kerim Friedman remarks that Brooks’s response is “much more insidious” and altogether worse than Pat Robertson’s much-lampooned suggestion that Haiti made a “pact with the devil.” After all, Friedman notes, people generally take David Brooks seriously.

‘Tis the season for best-of-the-year lists, and the Religion Newswriters Association has gotten in on the action with their list of 2009’s top ten religion stories. They compiled the list by surveying more than 100 religion journalists, about 36 of whom responded to the survey.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently released a new study of “Global Restrictions on Religion.” Pew casts the report as the first “quantitative study that reviews an extensive number of sources to measure how governments and private actors infringe on religious beliefs and practices around the world.” Its methodology, however, deserves scrutiny.

At Killing the Buddha, Kiera Feldman reports on a recent panel that brought together Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood. You wonder: what unites this seemingly motley crew of New York literati? They all claim an evangelical upbringing.

As the Washington Post’s Maria Glod reports, a group of yoga instructors in Virginia have asked a federal judge to kill the state’s plan to begin regulating instructor training. Under the plan, the state would certify (for a fee) yoga instructors in the same way that it certifies other vocationally-trained professionals, including dog groomers and bartenders. Yoga enthusiasts have responded to the plan by gesturing toward yoga’s supposed religious essence.

At U.S. Intellectual History, Raymond J. Haberski, Jr. appraises Barack Obama’s implicit invocations of civil religion in this week’s speech on the war in Afghanistan. In taking this interpretive approach, Haberski contributes to what has become a new academic tradition. Haberski’s take on the speech in fact encapsulates the new tradition’s range of opinions, for he identifies civil religion in Obama’s language at the same time that he asks whether the concept of civil religion amounts to more than “hogwash.”

At the New York Times, Patricia Cohen reviews Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, a recent best-seller in Israel that is now available in English. A scholar of modern France from Tel Aviv University, Sand explicitly presents his book as an attempt to undermine the twin notions that the “Jewish people”  share a single ancestry and that this people share ancestral rights to the land of Israel.

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.

At the New York Times, Sarah Lyall reports on an ongoing British case that centers on complex questions of Jewish identity, religious freedom (or its impossibility), and definitions of religion. By the end of the year, the British Supreme Court is expected to decide whether a school with Jewish roots had the right to deny a prospective student status as Jewish because his mother does not meet Orthodox standards of Jewishness. Without the preferential admissions treatment that such status carries at the oversubscribed London school, the student was denied admission, and his family cried foul. The case could have ramifications not just for other Jewish schools but also for other religious schools in Britain.