I’ve got a review essay coming out in 2015 in Numen (issue 62/1) that I just proofed. It’s on recent works concerned with the category religion. It was interesting to write, since it’s been twenty years since I wrote a similar essay on the category religion in scholarship.
continue readingMeet the Press
Our own Dr. Merinda Simmons recently published a book, titled Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora. In this post, she sat down for an interview to discuss the book, her work, and its relations to the academic study of religion.
continue readingThe Rising Tide of Theory
Iliff School of Theology is looking for a new colleague in what they term Religion and Social Justice (find the ad here). Two words in that ad stood out for me:
continue readingBig R and Little r
I recently wrote a review essay on the current state of scholarship on the category “religion” for the European history of religions journal, Numen (which comes out in 2015, I gather). It was fun to write, since its been 20 years since I first wrote a review essay on the same topic — “just how […]
continue readingMisdirection
The blogosphere is lighting up in response to yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that some “closely held” corporations can be considered to have “sincerely held religious beliefs” (i.e., those of their owners, of course, and not those of their employees) worth protecting — and, voila, some corporations can now be exempt from certain aspects of […]
continue readingChutzpah isn’t Hubris
I recall a conversation I once had, some years ago, about the possibility that our department might try to hire someone who worked on Asia, i.e., that we had submitted a proposal for such a position, but, of course, who knows if we’ll get it. The person with whom I spoke, who did his own […]
continue readingOf Practicing and Preaching
Are you familiar with the work of the Christian theologian John Howard Yoder (d. 1997)? I remember reading his classic The Politics of Jesus long ago, in a galaxy far far away from the academic study of religion. A recent New York Times article (Oct. 11, 2013), entitled, “A Theologian’s Influence, and Stained Past, Live […]
continue readingEliade Has Not Left the Building
There’s been lots of buzz, over the past decade or so, about material religion or embodied religion, as if this apparent emphasis on the empirical, the contingent, the historical, somehow gets us out of what many now see as the old rut of studying disembodied beliefs alone.
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