Reza Aslan is a Los Angeles-based writer, commentator and Islamic scholar. His new book is, “How to Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and The End of Terror.”

Ronnie Brust’s vision for a self-sufficient desert camp includes a kitchen, a living room and a giant projector screen hanging between scaffolding towers. At the center of the camp will be a 32-foot geodesic dome, the frame of which Brust spent Wednesday building in his mother’s yard at Sixth and Miller streets. He will transport the structure to Burning Man, the annual arts festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, later this summer.

Weekly family rail, with a review of the new “Transformers” movie, tips on volunteering and more.

Community Opportunities of East Ascension kicked off its “Dancing for a Cause” campaign Tuesday night. The fundraising event, modeled after the hit television show “Dancing with the Stars,” will be Aug. 14 in Gonzales, and feature local dancers.

For two years, Larry Tye pored through thousands of research pages and wrote hundreds of pages about an often-overlooked American icon: baseball great Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Satchel’s story, said Tye, is about overcoming “every obstacle any human being could ever imagine.”

Matthew and Tabitha (LeBlanc) Davis of Gonzales announce the birth of their daughter, Maggie Marie Davis.

BATON ROUGE – Area runners will lace up their shoes and begin their Fourth of July holiday with a morning run as they compete in the 25th annual BASF Freedom Mile.

Swamp Pop Music Festival cooks meeting July 6

Jambalaya chefs across Louisiana are invited to participate in the 11th Annual Jambalaya Cooking Contest July 17-18 during the 12th Annual Deep South Crane & Rigging Swamp Pop Music Festival at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales.

The best things in life can’t be bought, measured, won, or even earned. They can only be faithfully sought out, and received with great expectation. That simple truth is nowhere more evident than every Saturday morning at the Ascension Parish library in Galvez, where a close-knit group of parishioners gathers to speak and study Cajun French.

Tickets are on sale for Ascension Community Theatre’s summer production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’

Gonzales area students will participate in Center Stage Performing Arts Academy’s summer musical ‘Before and Beyond: A Salute to Musical Theatre” in July.

When consumers toss unused household chemicals and other hazardous items into the garbage, they wind up in municipal landfills, which often are not equipped to handle this kind of waste. But keeping cleaning solutions, insecticides and other items around the house has its dangers. Many household cleaning products, pest-control chemicals and lawn-care chemicals can be replaced with more natural, less toxic methods.

Todd Borne, a student at River Parishes Community College in Sorrento, was awarded a Carter Academic-Service Entrepreneur grant through the Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Partnership Foundation and the Louisiana Campus Compact for his proposal to teach computer skills to senior citizens.

An unusual chance to see a close pairing of Jupiter and Neptune awaits the next clear night. Due to its magnificence, brilliant Jupiter is easy to pick out and probably most people have seen it without even knowing it. Neptune, however, although it is a giant planet as well, is so far away very few people have ever seen it. This is a chance to find Neptune with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope with little trouble, since it is close by the King of Planets, Jupiter.

Rev. Gary T. Belsome, Pastor of St. Theresa of Avila Church in Gonzales, recently accepted a $10,000 check from Rotary Club of Gonzales member Gary Laiche to be used for the church Food Bank.