Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 1h

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.

Dave Jorgenson @davejorgenson.bsky.social · 7h

The Post laid off seemingly the remaining of their liberal-leaning staff members on Opinion last Thursday, when some of them were observing Yom Kippur.

from @oliverdarcy.bsky.social for Status
status.news/p/washington-post-opinion-cuts-adam-oneal

Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 6d

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.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 6d

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

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 …

opiniojuris.org

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 6d

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

Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 6d

Spoke with @charliesavage.bsky.social about how the administration is trying to backfill a legal rationale for US strikes in the Caribbean.

Seems by "determining" there is an armed conflict—without any basis in fact or law—POTUS is giving himself a license to kill.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told

www.nytimes.com

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Manan Ahmed @sepoy.bsky.social · 6d

Remembrances from colleagues of Brinkley Messick (1946-2025)

In Memoriam - Brinkley Messick — Middle East Institute

www.mei.columbia.edu

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Reposted by Nathan S. French

David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 8d

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?"

The Public Scholar

A Practical Handbook

www.press.jhu.edu

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Samuel Helfont @samuelhelfont.bsky.social · 9d

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!

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 12d

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?

Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 12d

Every scholar of religion reading this:

“Uh, which Christianity, exactly?”

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12d

What counts as “anti-fascist” is incredibly broad: basically opposition to much of the MAGA worldview - “anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity”
www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

The WHITE HOUSE
These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as "fascist" to justify and encourage
acts of violent revolution. This "anti-fascist" lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization), the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations. For example, Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called "anti-fascist" rhetoric.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 13d

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.

Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 13d

Douthat claims to care about humanities so maybe he could write something about how US News and World Reports appears to be vanishing much of humanities research by relying on Elsevier for research metrics which does not include standalone books in their database.

Screenshot from US News and World reports methodology.

Text:

The four ranking factors below reflect a five-year window from 2020-2024 to account for year-to-year volatility. Each of the four metrics is extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus® Data:

Citations per publication (1.25%): This is total citations divided by total publications. It's the average number of citations a university’s publications received.
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (1.25%): This is citation impact per paper, normalized for field, year of publication and publication type. This means a school receives more credit for its citations when in fields of study that are less widely cited overall.
Publication share in the Top 5% of Journals by CiteScore (1%): This is the share of an institution's publications published in the top 5% of the most cited journals by Elsevier’s CiteScore.
Publication share in the Top 25% of Journals by CiteScore (0.5%): This is the share of an institution's publications published in the top 25% of the most cited journals by Elsevier’s CiteScore.

The Elsevier Research Metrics Guidebook has detailed explanations of the four indicators used.

Each factor was calculated for the entire university. Elsevier compiled the number of publications – limited to peer-reviewed documents and books – that could be linked to each institution by name based on the institutional addresses of publications' authors.

Screenshot form Elsevier website:

CiteScore™ metrics you can verify and trust

CiteScore metrics enrich the evaluation of serial titles and provide transparent data to help you measure the citation impact for journals, book series, conference proceedings and trade journals. This comprehensive, clear and current system of metrics for analysis can be accessed for free on Scopus.

Powered by Scopus with active titles from 7000+ publishers across 334 disciplines, CiteScore provides transparent metrics that enable well-informed publishing strategy, library collection development and benchmarking of journal performance. More titles are being frequently added and tracked, with the freely available metrics.

See current CiteScore metrics

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 19d

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

Charlie Savage @charliesavage.bsky.social · 19d

A draft Authorization for Use of Military Force, circulating in exec branch & on the Hill, would grant Trump the power to kill people he deems narcoterrorists and to attack any nations he says are aiding/harboring them (e.g. a Venezuela regime change war). www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/u...

Draft Bill Would Authorize Trump to Wage Drug Trafficking War

www.nytimes.com

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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 21d

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

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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 22d

"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

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.

www.stevevladeck.com

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 25d

Every single time.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 26d

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

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 26d

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.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 28d

Great! Thanks for the quick response!

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 28d

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.

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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 29d

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).

Abu Aardvark’s Ghost @abuaardvark.bsky.social · 29d

Fun fact: Qatar, whose capital Israel just bombed, is a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 29d

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

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · 29d

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.

Riley Acton @riacton.bsky.social · Sep 8

🚨 New working paper alert! 🚨 #econsky

Emily Cook, Paola Ugalde, and I are thrilled to share "Political Views and College Choices in a Polarized America" — now out with both @iza.org and @annenberginstitute.bsky.social EdWorkingPapers

www.iza.org/publications...

edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1280

Political Views and College Choices in a Polarized America

Riley Acton
Miami University & IZA

Emily Cook
Texas A&M University & CESifo

Paola Ugalde A.
Louisiana State University

We examine the role of students’ political views in shaping college enrollment decisions in the United States. We hypothesize that students derive utility from attending institutions aligned with their political identities, which
could reinforce demographic and regional disparities in educational attainment and reduce ideological diversity on campuses. Using four decades of survey data on college freshmen, we document increasing political
polarization in colleges' student bodies, which is not fully explained by sorting along demographic, socioeconomic, or academic lines. To further explore these patterns, we conduct a series of survey-based choice experiments that quantify the value students place on political alignment relative to factors such as cost and proximity. We find that both liberal and conservative students prefer institutions with more like-minded peers and, especially, with fewer students from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The median student is willing to pay up to $2,617 (12.5%) more to attend a college where the share of students with opposing political views is 10 percentage points lower, suggesting that political identity plays a meaningful role in the college choice process.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · Sep 5

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.

Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · Sep 5

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.

Annette Yoshiko Reed @annetteyreed.bsky.social · Sep 4

A lot of the justifications point to the number of Religious Studies majors—but is this really how a dept’s value should be judged? In many RS departments in which I’ve taught, our courses have enormous enrollments & student interest +

“Counting majors does not reflect the value religious studies brings to a college, its proponents and practitioners say. Courses in religion are popular among undergraduates because they learn, often for the first time, about religion as something to study rather than to practice. Now that is more important than ever, some in the discipline say.”

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Matthew J Kuiper @matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · Oct 15

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.

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Nathan S. French @innesseff.bsky.social · Sep 5

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

Anne Whitesell @annewhitesell.bsky.social · Sep 4

Very excited to share the results from the survey @michalraucher.bsky.social & I conducted during our first year as @prri.org public fellows.

prri.org/spotlight/am...

We presented respondents with several vignettes and asked them, "Is this an abortion or a miscarriage?"

FIGURE 1
Title: Understanding Abortion vs. Miscarriage
Subtitle: Percent who say given scenario is:
Chart type: Stacked horizontal bar

Abortion
Miscarriage
Not Sure
Skipped
Person A
Self-medicate
71%
8%
20%
1%
Person B
Fetal defect
834%
4%
11%
1%
Person C
Five weeks
212%
62%
15%
1%
Person C
Seven weeks
23%
62%
15%
1%
Person D
No cardiac activity
24%
62%
14%
1%
Person E
Life at risk
75%
12%
12%
2%
Person E
Fertility at risk
79%
7%
14%
1%

Source: Reproductive Rights Public Fellows Ipsos Survey, 2025.

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