Muhammad’s Sword

Why the World Needs Religious Studies | Culture | Religion Dispatches. May the field forgive me for offering a bit of very crude historical psychoanalysis and master-narrativizing to catch everyone up on where we stand. Academic, non-sectarian religious studies in the United States can be more or less traced to the Supreme Court’s 1963 Abington Township v. Schempp decision, which carved out a distinction between teaching about religion, which is okay, and the teaching of religion, which violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Catechists had to shuffle out of public classrooms, and suddenly there was space for a new kind…

There is an interesting thesis here and some suggestive evidence. Will have to look up some of the articles referenced. Was Columbus secretly a Jew? – CNN.com. Recently, a number of Spanish scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.