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So I've discontinued the sidebar link blogging, which was a bit of a pre-Twitter relic. But I'll still post semi-regular roundups of links, with a shift toward doing what Twitter's not always so good at: giving a taste of the actual writing. In other words, here's some quotes.

New today from the Century: Mary Louise Bringle on why hymnals matter, Steve Thorngate on Phil Madeira's Mercyland project, more.

At CNN’s Belief Blog, John Blake offers four warning signs of when religious beliefs become evil. These include absolutism, charismatic leaders, apocalypticism, and the end justifying the means. He notes that “the line between good religion and evil religion is thin, and it’s easy to make self-righteous assumptions.”

Growing up, my listening habits progressed from the evangelical subculture’s schlockiest pop to its Americana fringe to secular alt-country. One common thread: prolific sideman Phil Madeira.

Barbara Kingsolver explores the dystopic effects of climate change in Flight Behavior, a novel about a family and community struggling through the rainiest winter in memory....

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c. 2013 Religion News Service...

In April 1993, the FBI siege on the Branch Davidian compound ended in disaster. The event still casts a long shadow on our divided nation.

c. 2013 Religion News Service...

Muslims in America are much less inclined to support suicide bombing than Muslims abroad and are more likely to believe that people of other faiths can a...

It seems odd in this era of “pervasive cultural irony” (David Foster Wallace) that Americans are so prone to sentimentality. We have been schooled to be cool with the shocking, the disgusting, the daring, the outrageous–to strike postures of ironic detachment and to mask our true feelings by displaying their opposite: indifference, say, for disappointment or amusement for anger. Having recently attended a reading featuring the poetry and fiction of undergraduates, I submit as anecdotal evidence a roomful of students and professors who winced not a whit as bland and clinical reportage about post-adolescent sexual experimentation was lauded as literary art.

This is a welcome development: Call them the debt crisis dissenters. The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue. And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention.

New today from the Century: Philip Jenkins on the Waco siege 20 years later, Debra Dean Murphy on sentimentalism and terrorism, more.

Three people died in the attack on the Boston Marathon. That same day, 11 Americans were murdered by guns.

When Karen Hunt Ahmed and her Muslim husband divorced four years ago, many friends asked her, “Now you can stop this Islam stuff, right?”...

Jesus’ promise that he and God will come make a home with us sounds like good news to me. Our so-called secular age purports to have disenchanted us of our pre-modern superstitions. Many of us find God’s stark absence from our daily affairs to be our most prominent experience of the divine.

If you check out Bibles online or in a bookstore, you are likely to run across something called a Life Application Study Bible....

New today from the Century: The editors on the relative problem of terrorism vs. gun violence, Andrew Packman blogs the lectionary, more.

The hardest review to write is the B- review. And the History Channel’s five-part miniseries The Bible is neither excellent nor miserable.