Welcome to NBR's Religious Studies PBWiki!

This page is intended to serve as an unofficial homepage and launchpad for a number of small projects. The first one is the new Religion-related news community at CommonTimes.org.

Anyone with the password can edit any page in the wiki or add new pages by clicking the red "edit" button on the top left of the screen. If you are interested in becoming a part of this community, simply send an email to me at religious (underscore) ct (at) eml (period) cc -- replace the (underscore), (at) and (period) with the appropriate punctuation marks -- and I'll be happy to reply with an easy-to-remember password. Anybody can join, but tell me a little about yourself so I know you're a real person and not a robot (and not a malicious web vandal just looking to erase all the pages on the site). I myself am an academic - I teach religious studies at a small college on the Eastern seaboard, and I have an abiding interest in the way religion is portrayed (negative, positive, indifferent or just weird) in the press and popular culture.

To give you an idea of the kind of stories that have interested me most recently:

• There was a recent New York times story on (mostly pretty far-out) religious and political interpretations of Hurricane Katrina
• There was this somewhat fluffy interview at MSNBC in June 2005 on how prayer can help you lose weight
• And then there was Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-PA) famous piece in Catholic Online back in 2002 that blamed the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church on the liberal, permissive culture of Boston (and of the U.S. more generally)
• And finally there are some great religion-related blogs that I follow: the Revealer, GetReligion, Habakkuk's Watchpost, SAFspace, Bartholomew's notes on religion and the inimitably brilliant Strangely Warmed (OK, OK, so that last one is my blog).

As of today, Sept. 17, that's all I've posted. But please feel free to get in on the conversation. Drop me a line.

If you're new to wikis and curious about them, the links below (posted by the ever helpful PBWiki.com administrators) can give you a quick overview, or visit the Wikipedia for more exhaustive information.

Introduction to Wikis

• WhatWikiIs - history and explanation
• WikiStyle - find out how to edit wikis
• SandBox - play around here to figure out how to edit wiki pages