The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency charged by Congress with monitoring liberty of conscience around the world, has just issued a report on prosecutions for blasphemy in other countries. Predictably, the leading offenders are Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Pakistan is cited as “the most egregious example … where blasphemy charges are common and numerous individuals are in prison, with a high number sentenced to death or life terms.”

Often on prominent display, Slavoj Zizek is radical philosophy incarnate. Hirsute, animated, staggeringly intelligent and expectedly misanthropic (it comes with the cognitive territory), Žižek is the "hero Gotham deserves". Or, to draw from the Socratic quote, he and his contemporaries have been attached to our epoch "by the god." Žižek  and co. (Tariq Ali,  Alain Badiou, Noam Chomsky) practice the art of ripping our society a new one, prompting incisive questions that beget awkward pauses and shuffling of feet from the addressed. They largely function to upset the status quo (or, bureaucratic routine). 

Slavoj Žižek has earned himself a reputation as something of a philosophical wild man, an epithet derived at least as much from the way he inhabits a room as it is from the content of his books. The crux of God in Pain  is a good one, and although tempting to see it as a corrective to Hitchens and Dawkins-esque writings on atheism, the latter group is so thoroughly outweighed by the sheer force of Žižek’s brain that the comparison is sort of pointless.