Begging anyone at all to take a Religious Studies course or speak to a Religious Studies scholar or maybe even just touch grass before publishing this stuff

If I'm a State AG, I'm working with my flagship universities to investigate how tuition and tax dollars were spent by Instructure. "Canvas successfully negotiated ... Your tuition and tax dollars are probably now sitting in a crime kingpin’s crypto wallet." www.chronicle.com/article/kill...

SECOND!

Yep. In an era of SciVal, US News & World Report Rankings, Scopus, and on, and on, and on. Less needs to be more in academia. "Production" is not a measure of professionalism or quality academic work.

Great to see the Chronicle publishing something that's not about AI or subtly boosting AI. Here's a message I can get behind, because it's true.

Brown Uni. Pres. Paxson on answering AI: “I think it’s communication, it’s critical thought. The fundamentals of a liberal education are probably more important than learning how to code in Java right now.” Brown froze admissions in 6 humanities PHD Programs in '25 www.wane.com/news/top-pic...

This is great. And, I think it might point to an idea — the study of religion in U.S. higher education is forced to respond (almost immediately) to changes in the material conditions of higher education. Gilded Age, WWII, Cold War, and, now the corporate transition into AI. Language is the same.

“It’s just a bittersweet symphony that’s life. Try to make ends meet you’re a slave to money then you die.”

You know the worst part of having a religion department close? When faculty in other departments and administrators express total amazement at stories like these: “Can you believe this? I’ve never heard of anything like this. How is no one talking about this?” You just sort of look at them and nod.

Having seen the headlines of a head of state calling the Pope, “WEAK” on crime. Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians hold as the Christ, to the thief, crucified on a cross next to Jesus: “And he said to him, ‘Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’" Luke 23:43, RSCVE

Side note: Trump again invokes the idea that Pope Leo should have been upset when worship restrictions were placed on religious groups during COVID, resulting in some arrests. Of note: The Trump admin has been/is being sued by dozens of faith groups, including the USCCB and Catholic priests.

Every single one of the astronauts who went to the moon and back on Artemis II was educated at a public school. Thinking of the teachers who poured into Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen tonight. You helped send a kid to the moon! 🌕 💛

Admit it, you also heard James Horner’s Apollo 13 soundtrack when Artemis II re-established comms and the parachutes deployed.

Went to high school in a red state. Every single public talk dealt with abstinence, waiting until marriage, the dangers of teen sex and teen pregnancy. This of course very much implied the idea that one needed a “stable” life for a family. That was over a quarter century ago.

While so many of Ohio’s public universities are cutting their religion departments and programs — and the “pro-religion” state legislature stays SILENT — I’m so thankful and happy to see universities like Denison invest in the religion department. Congrats to Krista and our colleagues at Denison!

Anecdotally, I've had colleagues ask me about this, too. A handful of students this semester have started requesting exemptions from assignments that suggest A.I. use on religious grounds.

Never a dull moment in the study of religion these days. Hard to keep up, really.

NEW: A Department of Defense official has confirmed to @rns.org that the much-discussed meeting between the papal nuncio and military officials at the Pentagon (mentioned below) DID happen — but they're disputing the Free Press' assessment.

Following the news of the ceasefire and I can’t get the final scene of “Burn After Reading” out of my head. “What did we learn?” youtu.be/kCXTq-fWWio?...

The leading researchers behind the Arab Barometer are out with a new @foreignaffairs.com piece examining America’s plummeting popularity (and the growing acceptance of China) in the region There is some variation across countries but the trends are clear www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/america...

“Ecce homo.”

As an astronaut kid (which we never stop being) amazed by @ and Artemis II -- people my age going to the Moon! and a scholar of religion, there's a lot of interesting material out there about religion in space! Let's have a 🧵 as Intrepid hurtles through space ... (1/n)

This NYT headline will come as some surprise to my International Studies students who think it’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Watching the Artemis II mission and wondering if the astronauts on board Integrity will have any sort of religious or spiritual reading, much as the Apollo 8 astronauts read from Genesis 1:1-10 on December 24, 1968 youtu.be/5EVtnKJn6-o?...

It’s a heckuva time to be at a university without a religion department. www.huffpost.com/entry/news-l...

At a point when offering classes on the Middle East has never been more important in the U.S., Syracuse University, this week, announced that it will be ending its Middle Eastern Studies major. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/n...

This really is a moment in my career I won’t forget. The US is locked in a war of choice against the Islamic Republic of Iran while Trump administration cabinet members speak of “might making right.” All while US universities cut classics, Middle East studies, and religious studies.

NASA is honestly one of the greatest things humans have ever created, the stuff of math and dreams

“For all mankind.”

Join the “cool as hell” party. We explore space together.

For further, see Muhammad Ali’s fights, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf’s NBA career, and Husain Abdullah’s NFL career. See also the NBA career of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“we found overwhelming opposition to the war, deep skepticism that it would produce either democracy or a pro-American autocracy, and a really concerning upsurge in self-censorship around issues related to Iran.” Academics think Middle East going great. abuaardvarkghost.ghost.io/what-middle-...

The peak annual supplemental for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the $196 billion the Bush admin requested in 2008 as the Iraq surge wound down and Afg ramped up. The two Iraq supplementals in 2003, the year of the invasion, added up to $167B. (Invasion one alone was $79B.)

This split screen looks like something from Adam Curtis as part of a “Power of Nightmares” trilogy.

Support to faculty in Middle East studies, Islamic studies, PoliSci, Intl. Studies, Anthro., who are speaking with students from the region, U.S. veterans, active duty personnel, reservists, national guardsman about this war in your offices. Those are real conversations you're having. They matter.

Can't help but think this DOGE staffer has a substack out there that's 1,500 words long and talks about how A.I. will disrupt the humanities. Make sure you watch to his dicsussion of the Holocaust. Best watched with the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" soundtrack.

This document is making the rounds on that other website with people proclaiming it a "fatwa" from Ayatullah Ali al-Sistani and arguing that it calls for jihad, self-defense, and the mobilization of the Shi'a. Nope. On a superficial read, it appears to be authentic. This is not a "jihad fatwa."

I'm posting this twice. It's these "financial managers" who are driving the restructuring of U.S. higher ed. Their data & analysis leads to closures of Middle East, Jewish, Islamic, and religious studies programs and departments. And, now they're bemoaning "geopolitics." bsky.app/profile/yeom...

So too, bravo to all the courageous universities that are defunding, “merging”, or cutting altogether Middle East and other Area Studies programs, along with languages, Religious Studies, History, etc. Very strategic.

Protests in Pakistan have resulted in a call by the Pakistani gov't for a curfew. Participants in those protests include Pakistani Shi'i communities responding in protest to Khamenei's killing in Iran. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/...

Now, I'm just a professor trained in religious and Islamic studies, but if my (checks notes) funds manager at a large global hedge fund w/ a presence in Dubai demonstrated this egregious a capacity for evaluating risk, I'd move my money elsewhere. But, I'm a scholar in the late humanities era.

In case you're wondering how some sectors of the Christian right are seeing Trump's war in Iran, I've just read several articles seeing a prophetic meaning in a coincidence of Trump's strikes, the assassination of Khameni, and a blood moon occurring on Purim (tomorrow).

There is so much AI-driven slop on that “other website” right now. Armchair experts posting long-form drivel on weapons systems, ideologies, and politics that they don’t understand. Glad to see a lot of smart folks on here noting that there’s not much to know. Epistemic humility is a virtue.

Lots of speculation about the status of Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Many analysts are missing that if Khamenei is killed, there isn’t just an effect on Iranian politics. Khamenei is held by some Shi’a across the world as a “marja-e taqlid,” a source of religious authority and emulation.

Absolutely true. Officer candidates, veterans, reservists, and active duty personnel have always commanded the respect and appreciation of their professors at my institution, regardless of the professor’s political stances.

Ironic that one of the legacies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a presidency that can initiate wars on whim, without even the pretense of building a case to the American people first.

Oman's FM Badr Albusaidi, who has been mediating the recent rounds of indirect talks between the US and Iran, has reacted to today's attacks by the US and Israel on Iran. 🔴 LIVE updates: aje.news/x068qe

I haven't seen a single major news outlet observe that the US and Israeli-led war against Iran is occurring during the month of Ramadan.

On Tuesday, I had on the syllabus to lecture on 1979 in my course on Jihadi-Salafism — the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I think I’ll be adding the 2026 US-Israeli-Iranian war.