The Immanent Frame

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.

At Progressive Revival, Paul Raushenbush takes the occasion of the Fort Hood tragedy to point out that American culture and media consistently treat “White, Male, Christians” as a normative individual identity, while members of other minority groups often feel pressure to distance themselves from acts performed by people who look or sound like them.

At Call & Response, Mark Chavez draws upon an April 2008 article by Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski to explain why fewer black congregations tend to have websites than predominately white congregations.

At U.S. Intellectual History, Tim Lacy reflects upon the abiding significance of the field. Lacy focuses his three-part discussion on a forum that appeared earlier this year in Historically Speaking. With contributions from such historians as Daniel Wickberg, David A. Hollinger, Sarah E. Igo, and Wilfred M. McClay, the forum covered issues ranging from the usefulness of intellectual metanarratives to pedagogy.

At Front Porch Republic, Darryl Hart laments that historians and other observers of religion in America too often cast the religious Right as a new, ominous phenomenon. Hart insists that “that the Religious Right is nothing new in U.S. history and that scaring citizens with the apparently bizarre proposals of Christian conservatives is bad scholarship.”

The indie-music authority Pitchfork reports that Billy Corgan (of the Smashing Pumpkins) and David Byrne (of the Talking Heads) will participate next month in the Rubin Museum’s upcoming dialogue series on Carl Jung’s recently unearthed Red Book, which received attention last month in the New York Times.

At the New Yorker, Anthony Lane finds much to fault in Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying, including Gervais’s treatment of religious faith in general and Christianity in particular.

At Sightings, James L. Evans comments on an upcoming revision to the New International Version of the Bible, an edition that has served for the past couple decades as evangelicals’ translation of choice. Evans does not mention the Conservative Bible Project, which attracted substantial media attention this week, but that project certainly gives his piece added resonance.

On 16-17 October 2009, the CUNY Graduate Center will host a conference in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination. The event will be sponsored by the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center and the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.

The New York Times weighs in on the case of the Mojave Cross (Salazar v. Buono, 08-472), which the Supreme Court currently is considering. First constructed in 1934 as a World War I memorial, the cross is located within in the Mojave National Preserve in San Bernardino County, California. In 2001, Frank Buono, an former employee of the National Park Service, filed suit claiming that the cross violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. He won both in district court (2002) and appellate court (2004). Yet on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed the idea that “the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.” The New York Times disagrees.