A lot of people in our field now advocate approaches that find religion either in unexpected or overlooked places. What once might have been called the implicit religion movement, at least as once associated with the work of the late Ed Bailey, has now been joined by the more-or-less related lived religion, material religion, religion […]
continue readingOn Reading Each Other
Recently, a friend brought to my attention a 2015 article, by Amy Hollywood, published in Revista de Estudios Sociales, that takes issue with my work. The essay turns out to be an excerpt from what was then her forthcoming collection of essays (published in 2016). Although none of my work is cited in the essay […]
continue readingProblems in the Big Tent
On social media yesterday a variety of people posted a link to a recent First Things blog post by a theology professor at Nortre Dame who made the argument that religions other than Christianity do not have theologies. For although “[n]on-Christian piety is real and profound,” or so she claims, she defines the term theology […]
continue readingWhen Religion and Artistic License Clash
Jackson Nock is a senior from Denver, Colorado. He is a double major in International Studies and Religious Studies with a minor in Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies.This post was written as part of Prof. Ramey’s REL 322: Tales from Asia course. When we think of art, we think of a world in which creativity and expression […]
continue readingAgency, Structure, and the Myth of the Immaculate Perception
National Public Radio on the weekend played a story (an interview with Neal Gabler, the author of an Atlantic article on the same topic) about how hard many in the US have it economically.
continue readingGod Bless America
By Katie Brinser Katie Brinser is from Lindenhurst, IL. She is a senior majoring in International Studies and Finance with a minor in Arabic Language and Culture. This post was originally written for Eleanor Finnegan‘s REL 370 class In September, Pope Francis visited the United States and became the first pope to address the US […]
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 readingKeeping it Private — or Not
A recent development, reported here, nicely illustrates the socio-political function of privacy, e.g., the (once?) widespread notion that those claims on behavior that were said to be premised on religious belief are merely a private affair concerning faith, sentiment, etc. For now this once common presumption is being troubled — inasmuch as the U.S. Supreme […]
continue readingEmbedded in Religion
What ideological positions are embedded within the practices and conceptions that we commonly identify as religions? Depending on one’s own ideological position and perspective, various people emphasize the patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and violence within various examples of religion. People will certainly debate if those ideological positions are typical in expressions of religion or an accretion to […]
continue readingMembership Has Its Privileges
My first book, Manufacturing Religion, was a critique of what I called the discourse on sui generis religion — that is, the approach to studying religion that presumes its object of study is somehow unique, self-caused, original, one of a kind, can’t be fully explained, etc. To rephrase it, it was a critique of those […]
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