Satan and Saddam

Check out this interesting Salon.com article. It's an interview with a scholar who studies literary and popular culture references to Satan and the occult, although the headline is somewhat misleading: it isn't necessarily about how a belief in Satan relates to right-wing beliefs about the War on Terror, but how popular impressions of Satan have changed in the last fifty years as the pendulum of religion has swung once more towards the experiential rather than the intellectual.

What is most startling, though, is the author's descriptions of how his colleagues respond to his books and research: with disdain, that such things are beneath the realm of intellectual study. It seems to me that a large religious movement with well-funded political connections and influence should never be beneath the realm of intellectual study.