The apocalyptic ideology of ISIS needs to be appraised in a balanced, nuanced way. If we are serious about confronting the apocalyptic tendencies and perspectives of fringe groups as they not only potentially radicalize populations but may eventually lead to – and legitimate – violence, then we must be ready to acknowledge that this is not only a problem “over there,” but rather also constitutes a problem much closer to home. As recent events have made clear, this is a problem with tangible consequences for our society, our discourse, and our politics, and so such comparative analysis proves to be much more than a merely academic exercise.

X-Men Gold #1 was released last week, and just a few days after, some readers detected troubling political and religious subtexts inserted by the book's Indonesian artist, Ardian Syaf...

How to evaluate narrative-historical sources is the subject of intense controversies in Islamic Studies and beyond. Arguably, no student of Islamic history can escape the conundrum of debates surrounding these sources. Chase Robinson aptly observed, “it is a measure of just how conservative the professional study of Islamic history remains that the noisiest controversy of the last 25 years concerns the reliability of our written sources, rather than the models according to which we are to understand and use them.” When a scholar makes a claim about the supposed “unreliability” of late antique Islamic sources, she often operates under the positivist assumption of the existence of an “original Truth” that can be discovered through a specific methodology...