Nathan S. French

Finished a Christian material cultures unit. Students watched the 1980s Hanna-Barbera “Great Adventures from the Bible: Noah’s Ark” cartoon & played the board game. One of them said they watched it as part of a confirmation class. That would’ve been in the 2010s. Sorry, @profirmf.bsky.social

Item 1 — You should hire, not fire columnists and reporters right now. Especially religion reporters (if I may).

Item 2 — If you must fire reporters and columnists, don’t do it during a religious observance.

Somebody should’ve paid attention in their religion courses in college.

This approach by the U.S. Executive of issuing these findings emerges after Republican AND Democratic presidencies have claimed ever ever-expanding executive authority over uses of force AND Republican AND Democratic-controlled congresses permitted it.

Let’s Call Killing al-Awlaki What It Still Is — Murder As everyone on Twitter knows by now, the US government has released the notorious memorandum in which the OLC provides the supposed legal justification for killing Anwar al-Awlaki. I’m a bit …

See, for example: opiniojuris.org/2014/06/23/l...

This reminds me of when @kevinjonheller.bsky.social wrote about the Obama administration’s killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and it apparently (allegedly) changed its argument midstream in response to his blogpost on Opinion Juris

Remembrances from colleagues of Brinkley Messick (1946-2025)

The Public Scholar A Practical Handbook

COVER REVEAL AND PREORDER: The Public Scholar - A Practical Handbook.

"Perry focuses on the practical details of how to approach public scholarship. How do you pitch a piece to an editor? When should you follow or ignore the rules of the genre? And what happens once your piece is out in the world?"

Coming from @stanfordpress.bsky.social in the summer of 2026! @lisablaydes.bsky.social and I edited a book "Ba'thist Iraq through Archives" with a star studded list of contributors!

And before someone says, “See! These lib profs!”

Think for a second? There are *Christian-identifying* communities who don’t consider others “biblical.” Just taught a Presbyterian debate on “slain in the spirit” as practiced in Pentecostalism being unbiblical

Is that anti-Christian sentiment?

Every scholar of religion reading this:

“Uh, which Christianity, exactly?”

More and more folks need to be talking about the fact that Elsevier has exerted remarkable control over the US News methodology in order to secure a future for its academic journal subscription model.

Side effect? Complete erosion of humanities and social science scholarship.

The second law of the Global War on Terror-era is that the Global War on Terror never ends. It only transforms.

None of the most prominent people talking about universities have any real idea what does and doesn’t happen in classrooms.

126. The "Fixed Star in Our Constitutional Constellation" It's worth spending time with Justice Robert Jackson's 1943 majority opinion holding that the First Amendment bars compulsory flag salutes and compelled recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

Justice Robert Jackson, 1943

Every single time.

And, as @jackjenkins.me would agree, more religion and staffers dedicated to the study of religion and spirituality. These things all inter-relate.

In my experience as a scholar of religion, when a religious or spiritual community’s narratives & worldview are challenged by the “facts-on-the-ground,” they will turn to supernatural narratives — Satanic or demonic possession, for example, or simple disbelief — to make sense of what’s transpired.

Great! Thanks for the quick response!

Sorry to ask for a link to that policy at VA Tech, but as a member of our university senate in a one-party consent state, I’d be interested in seeing that language and raising it with our senate.

I want to underline this point for everyone outside foreign policy, NatSec, and Middle East circles.

Israel bombing a US partner (Qatar) is significantly different from bombing countries the US considers adversarial (Iran, Assad's Syria) or groups the US designates as terrorists (Hezbollah, Hamas).

Oh dang! Now I’ll have to take a look.

Good read. Each year - for the last several - I’ve informally surveyed a few of my classes, on matters of religious & political beliefs. Completely anonymous. Students are amazed that so many students in the class are like them … but several note they chose their university hoping for that.

And those weren’t just GenEd courses. Our classes served multiple majors with advanced content. When the axe came, it simply didn’t matter.

Numbers of majors were the preferred analytic.

YES. Reading through articles covering religion department closures — seeing AAR tout the health of programs graduating 5 alumni per year — has been eye-opening. Five majors per year shuts down programs in some states, such as Ohio, as a matter of law.

Our enrollments were 800+/yr before closure.

It’s not a very serious one, but a real, sometimes irksome, burden scholars of religion have to bear is the need to explain & re-explain that, no, we’re not glorified Sunday school teachers, but actual scholars (historians, sociologists, etc) engaged in the *academic* or critical study of religion.

Cool colleagues, ya’ll. Cool, cool colleagues.

FINALLY. Someone FINALLY covered this.

I mean … find the lie?

Getting caught up on today’s headlines and I’m of the general opinion that there is a non-zero chance they bring back leaded gasoline for health reasons.

This feels familiar. The number of times that legal arguments were still being drafted under the Bush and Obama administrations during the drone campaign in Yemen…