I am so excited to announce that my essay on Islam and cultural appropriation in the Dune franchise was published by The Revealer!

Titled, “Layers of Dune: A Sandworm-sized Case Study of Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Science Fiction,” I lay out a few of my thoughts of how Frank Herbert uses Islam to tell his story about humanity’s far future on the desert world of Arrakis.

This essay took me quite a long time to put together, and I really appreciate the support I received from the team at Sacred Writes (especially Brook!), and of course Brett Krutzsch, editor at The Revealer for shepherding the project along from inception to publication.

I hope this is just the beginning of more and more public-facing writing on pop culture. To paraphrase a common refrain from Dune, “the [critique] must flow!”

It has been a busy month! I last posted in early July with an online lecture, “Introduction to Religious Studies,” offered through Pitkin County Senior Services in Aspen, CO. In the past month I completed additional lectures on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sufism. The embedded links are to these videos on YouTube, and you can also access them through Pitkin County Senior Services list of activities.

These lectures have been really fun to create. Squeezing as much as possible into a 30-40 minute presentation is a great challenge, even if for every piece content included, there are 100+ things excluded. My hope is that these lectures provide a starting point for anyone interested in learning about world religions. I’ve included a slide at the end of each presentation featuring “additional readings,” for further study.

As I said, there are more lectures in the works, stay tuned for the next group!