As this year’s Banned Books Week draws to a close, I thought I’d list the banned (self-imposed or otherwise) books in my life (and the books with which I violated these bans):

As a 16-year-old converting to Mormonism, I committed to not read anything that would make me question my faith (after A Wrinkle in Time […]

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As an atheist, I have to say that I feel comfortable with many of the arguments that Sam Harris sets forth in The End of Faith (I’m about 100 pages in). They are old friends that set me to questioning my most cherished, deeply entrenched assumptions. I used to attend the Church of […]

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Sam Harris talks a lot about a little thing I like to call…religion.
What, my friends, is religion? Can you come up with a working definition we can all agree on? Or do we just know it when we see it?
Are there problems with how Harris uses the term?

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I prepared the following for my grad seminar on “Women, Globalization and Religion” earlier this evening after a) reading an account of a Catholic-Muslim alliance against an international effort to improve the political and economic situation for women around the globe and b) learning about the murder of Safia Amajan, Afghani campaigner for women’s rights, […]

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If you find examples of fallacious logic, unfounded stereotyping or other hateful prose, post it in the comments here.  Please remember to include the chapter and page number.

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If you find a particularly insightful quote (or pithy, well-written prose) that you’d like to share with others, post it in the comments.¬† Please remember to include the chapter and page number.

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Ramadan begins *today. For Muslims around the world, this means that they are to abstain from worldly pleasures during daylight hours to remember and honor the month that the Holy Qur’an was revealed by Gabriel to Mohammed (may his name be forever blessed).
Before I quit my job, one of my cubicle-mates was Muslim (well, she […]

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I loved the discussion that followed Ah, Girl but thought it was a shame that although we were talking about the power of music to communicate what words can’t, we were still depending on those poor, limited words. I purchased the songs I didn’t already own from iTunes and eMusic and listened to them while […]

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I removed the sticky post and added a link to the top of the blog after reviewing the site logs–it seems like regular readers who aren’t interested in the Sam Harris business are missing other new posts. This post will continue to be updated periodically.
For the month of October (and the last little bit […]

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40-year-old Anousheh Ansari entered the International Space Station today. All of the newsfeeds I read bill her as “the first female space tourist,” but al-Jazeera (via Reuters) also notes that she is the first female Muslim and first Iranian in space. I have to admit that I have a little web-crush on her: […]

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