ABSTRACT
In 1997, a television news reporter called me to set up an interview about the Heaven’s Gate suicides that had occurred in San Diego the previous week. Scholars of religion are often given the task of explaining what seems inexplicable: why educated and economically comfortable men and women would decide to die by their own hand to catch a ride on an alien ship they thought was behind the Hale-Bopp comet, why dedicated Muslims would destroy innocent people on September 11, 2001, or how Catholic priests could justify molesting boys under their spiritual guidance. These and other examples of religious people’s incomprehensibility to outsiders are a typical occasion on which religion scholars speak to the news media.
