A longstanding debate across disciplines arose once again at a co-sponsored panel at the conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), last November, during a session (pictured above) devoted to reviewing Brent Nongbri’s recent book, Before Religion.
continue readingWhat It Gives With One Hand….
I found this over at the Huffington Post this morning — an announcement for a new HarvardX (part of edX) course on religious literacy. The course is described as follows:
continue readingProfiting from a Bankruptcy
Are you looking for a way to think through what it takes for a local idea to spread worldwide and be adopted globally — an idea such as the now taken-for-granted assumption that the world has such things in it as religions, which exist in a variety of (as Wilfred Cantwell Smith once phrased it) […]
continue readingThe Category Religion — Twenty Years Later
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 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 readingBackstory: Prof. Eleanor Finnegan
“Backstory” is a series that asks the REL Faculty to tell us a little bit about themselves, to explore how they became interested in the academic study of religion and their own specialty, elaborating on their current work both within and outside the University. Where are you from? I am from Lexington, Massachusetts. It is […]
continue reading