A bit of theological navel-gazing this morning over Haiti: Jeff Weiss over at Politics Daily sees a silver lining in Pat Robertson’s the devil-made-me-do-it narrative on Haiti. Newsweek’s Lisa Miller asks why God seems to hate Haiti, the “Job among nations,” and Religion Dispatches ponders why many people search for God’s fingerprints in the rubble of a disaster. NYT writes how the Haiti earthquake is leading to another type of seismic shift: a New York village that has a mix of Orthodox Jews, Latinos and blacks has put aside cultural differences to come together to provide aid for Haiti disaster relief.

Malaysian police have arrested eight Muslim men in connection with a fire-bombing of a church last month; violence has flared over whether non-Muslims can use “Allah” to refer to God. Vandals (Christians? It’s unclear) then attacked an Islamic prayer hall. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, local officials say only 23 — not the 200+ claimed by human rights groups — died in recent Christian-Muslim violence (CS Monitor backgrounder here).

In Indonesia, Muslim clerics are arguing whether straightening women’s hair is what the Catholics would call a “near occasion to sin.” Egypt’s top court ruled that female students should be able to wear the niqab, or full-face veil, during exams, while the coutry’s top Muslim cleric frowned on using Quranic verses as your cellphone ringtone.

A USAirways flight made an emergency landing in Philly this morning after a passenger mistook another passenger’s phylacteries — two small black boxes with black straps attached to them, worn by Orthodox Jews — for some kind of bomb. Oops.

In a sign of growing American exports (at least in the category of Made in the USA church-state spats that we’re so good at manufacturing) Japan’s supreme court said it was wrong for the city of Sunagawa to allow a Shinto shrine to be erected on public property without a fee. In Michigan, a man suing over the government’s bailout of insurance giant AIG wants to depose Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; the man says the bailout was illegal because AIG catered to the Islamic financial market. You follow all that?

Here at home, Muslim groups (and I suspect more than a few Christians) are demanding an end to the military’s use of rifle scopes inscribed with Bible verses. But in a move Muslims groups have long pushed for, Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan (banned by the Bush administration from entering the US) will now be allowed to step on American shores.

Christianity Today has its list of the top religion books of 2009. Gallup, meanwhile, finds a new category of equal-opportunity bigots: People who don’t like Muslims also generally don’t like Jews.

Prop 8 update: Yesterday lawyers tried to show how Catholics and Mormons specifically, and religion more generally, fuel homophobia. Next up: a California man who says gay-rights activists ultimately want to legalize sex with children will be called as a hostile witness in the ongoing federal lawsuit. That should be interesting.

And finally this, just in from the Dept. of Things We’ve Long Suspected But Never Had Confirmed: former Sen. (and wannabe president) John Edwards finally admits he’s the father of a daughter born as the result of an affair with a campaign aide. Must have been her long flowing (straight) tresses.