How scholars use categories to name things, and thereby identify those things that deserve our critical attention, has long interested me. And among the things that have caught my attention over the years is the once prominent category “civil religion” — one made famous by the late U.S. sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s […]
continue readingAnnouncing the 2021 American Examples Participants
The Department of Religious Studies is so happy to announce the participants in the 2021 American Examples program. This will be the third year of the program’s history and the second year the program has been funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. This year’s program will be hosted virtually, due to the […]
continue readingTrue or False or a Mix of Both? The Dissonance of the Gospels presented in Galatia
Rebekah Pearson ’22 is a Religious Studies-Dance Performance double major. In Prof. Newton’s Introduction to the New Testament course, she examined Paul’s Letter to the Galatians as an artifact of competing social definitions. This essay was part of her group’s Bible in Culture zine. Learn more in the first, second, third, and fourth posts of the series. Imagine […]
continue readingPublic Service Announcement
The day I meet postmodernists whose relativism does not disappear the minute they start talking about salaries and workloads is the day I will take relativism seriously. That’s a quotation I saw posted on social media yesterday, from Steve Bruce‘s new book Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science. My comment on the site? I […]
continue readingStudying Religion in Culture in Denver–AAR, SBL, and NAASR 2018!
If Manly Hall is a little quieter in Mid-November, trust that the faculty are keeping busy. Many in our Department will be headed to the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). And as you can […]
continue readingIn Other Words…
Like some of you, I woke today to an email soliciting submissions for a special issue of the open access online journal Open Theology. The email opened as follows: A person who reads texts from other religious traditions sometimes encounters what the reader understands to be a transcendent encounter with ultimacy. Encounters with the ultimate […]
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 readingDamned if You Zoo, Damned if You Don’t: Mignolo and the Philosophy of Religion
While the future and composition of the philosophy of religion is being challenged by several authors, I’ll wager that few are daring to teach its topics differently in their 100-level courses. For Labor Day weekend (2017), I was at Drake University for a meeting of the seminar on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion. Where […]
continue readingThe Limits of the Field
Only recently did it come to my attention that one of the journals in our field now seems to understand itself in a curiously narrow way.
continue readingBarometers in the Field: Another Student Report from the Regional AAR
Sierra Lynn Lawson is an Anthropology and Religious Studies double major and a Spanish minor. She is from a small town in Wyoming and hopes to study the illegality of midwifery in Alabama as it relates to post-civil war identity formation. I was most pleased with my experience at the Southeastern Commission for the Study […]
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