If you’ve paid attention to the news in the US over the past week or so, you’ll know that a bomber was loose in Austin, Texas, and that the suspect was cornered by authorities the other day and blew himself up.
continue readingYes, Patches O’Houlihan is My Pedagogical Mentor
You seen “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” (2004)? No? Well it provides some important pedagogical lessons.
continue readingJim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
In the close to Fabricating Origins — a recent collection of short essays, by a wide array of scholars, on the problem of origins — I used the example of Jim and Pam, from the U.S. adaptation of the British series, “The Office,” to illustrate how malleable, and thus useful, the archive of the past […]
continue readingWe’re All Freelancers
In this day of increasingly corporatized higher ed, where we sometimes interact with students through the medium of learning management systems, and in which scholars’ relationships with publishers is equally mediated through online submission systems, it’s worth mulling over for who benefits from such systems. For whom are they designed and to what effect?
continue readingThe Devil’s in the Details
My early book was cited near the start of Chris Kavanagh‘s recent online essay, as an example of a work in the study of religion that — despite him agreeing that there is “much that is valid in such critiques” — seems to constitute “academic minutiae” that we should put behind us, so we can […]
continue readingThe Myth of Charismatic Visionaries
Let’s play a game Which one of these quotes is from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing just the other day, and which is from William James, the American psychologist of religion, writing well over 100 years ago?
continue readingThe Tremendous Irony of it All
Last week there was some chatter online about the nominations put forward for the leadership of our field’s main professional association. (Question: why does the nominating committee exercise a monopoly on determining the organization’s leadership?) Apart from a variety of posts on Facebook and Twitter, the blogs I saw were those by Mike Altman, Aaron […]
continue readingWeaving the Thread of Oregon’s Origins
By Jared Powell Jared Powell is a senior from Canton, Mississippi majoring in English and Religious Studies If you follow college football, like most folks around here do, then you’ve surely heard a thing or two about the Oregon Ducks. Oregon has carved their place as one of the most successful college teams of the past […]
continue reading“Who said names were supposed to be easy to say? What are you, a candy bar?”
Students in REL 237 are watching Avalon this week, a 1990 film about the changes that take place within a family of early to mid-20th century Americans who, like so many of our ancestors, came to this continent from somewhere else. “I came to America in 1914…, by way of Philadelphia. That’s where I got […]
continue readingBeyond “Belief”
There was a time when I preferred to say “beliefs, behaviors, and institutions” as my way of complicating the philosophically idealist presumptions that drive our use of the word “belief” in the study of religion — a word we often use to make sense of what people, like those pictured above, are doing. But I […]
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