Jillian Scott
Jillian Scott recently finished her Master’s degree in Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her dissertation was entitled “Ritualized Terrorism: Symbolic Religious Violence and the Secular State in a Globalized World”. Originally from San Francisco, California, Jillian lives in Edinburgh and continues to study the relationships between religion, violence and international relations. She has […]
Kim Knott
Kim Knott is Professor of Religious and Secular Studies at Lancaster University. She works on contemporary religion and the ‘secular sacred’, and their interrelationship. She developed a spatial methodology in Jolyon Mitchell, in L Woodhead and R Catto (eds), Religion and Change in Modern Britain (2012). She participates in a large programme of research on ‘Religion and Diversity’, funded by the SSHRC in […]
J. Gordon Melton
Dr. Melton is Distinguished Professor of American Religious History of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies in Religion, as of March, 2011. In 1968 he founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion and has remained it’s director for the last 44 years. The institute is devoted to organizing, motivating, and producing research-based studies and educational […]
Gordon Lynch
Gordon Lynch is the Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent where he teaches on the sacred in modern Western Society. Professor Lynch has published a number of works including an edited volume with Jolyon Mitchell and has recently published two books on the sacred, The Sacred in the Modern World and On the Sacred. […]
James R. Lewis
James R. Lewis is a associate professor of religious studies at the University of Tromsø. Among Lewis’ latest titles are the monographs Children of Jesus and Mary: The Order of Christ Sophia (2009) and the forthcoming Embracing the Darkness: Modern Satanism(with Asbjørn Dyrendal & Jesper A. Petersen) andRoutledge Introduction to New Religious Movements. Among his edited collections are Violence and New Religious […]
Mark Juergensmeyer
Mark Juergensmeyer is a former president of the American Academy of Religion and the current director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also teaches sociology and religious studies. He is a prolific writer and speaker whose work deals with South Asian religion and politics, […]
Eileen Barker
Eileen Barker OBE, FBA, is Emeritus Professor of Sociology with special reference to the study of Religion at the London School of Economics. She has been researching minority religions and the responses to which they give rise since the early 1970s. Her study of conversion to the Unification Church for her PhD, led to an interest in a wide […]
Jolyon Mitchell
Before being appointed to the University of Edinburgh, Jolyon Mitchell worked as a producer and journalist for BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4. As Director of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues he directs a number of research projects and helps to host a wide range of public lectures and events. His latest book […]
Stereotypes and Dangerous Rituals: A Reflection on the Academic Study of Serpent-Handling
“While Hollywood often takes a critical stance in the name of provocation and artistic freedom, scholars of particular social and cultural groups often find themselves working against the grain of collective assumptions.”
In one melancholic and chilling scene in director Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), leading man Brad Pitt’s rendition of the famous American outlaw sits outside his Missouri home.
Religious Studies Opportunities Digest – 17 May 2013
I would like to announce the publication of a new academic periodical, the Journal of Religion and Violence (ISSN: 2159-6808). The JRV is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of religion and violence. In addition to publishing analyses of contemporary and historical religious groups involved in violent incidents, the Journal of Religion and Violence publishes articles and book reviews on theorists of religious such as René Girard,
Religious Studies Opportunities Digest – 12 April 2013
The project is a comprehensive and informative resource that systematically sorts out the available undergraduate and graduate programs available today in the U.S. This information is very valuable to students today who are not only dealing with the competitive nature of higher education, but also the rising costs of it.
Religious Studies Opportunities Digest – 5 April 2013
Description: Association for Modern Japanese Literary Studies (AMJLS) is happy to announce the conference and call for papers below, Call for papers: “International Research Conference:Interfaces of Modern Japanese Literature” Application deadline: May 31, 2013 Location: Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan Date: Dec
Post-Westphalianism Versus Homogenization Theories of Globalization and Religion
“Religion is not, in Beyer’s model, something that attempts to respond to this process. Rather it is an integral aspect of globalization.”
In a recent podcast interview with The Religious Studies Project’s Chris Cotter, Peter Beyer discussed the relationship between globalization and religion, a topic which is highly relevant to the current state of society.
Sociotheology and Cosmic War
Over the course of the last few decades religious violence has become an increasingly salient topic of public discourse and particularly in its global manifestations. In the social sciences these discourses focus primarily on explanations of violent acts that are driven by the socio-political contexts enveloping them.
Religious Studies Opportunities Digest – 11 Jan 2013
Religion and Knowledge: Sociological Perspectives, edited by Mathew Guest and Elisabeth Arweck, was published by Ashgate in November 2012.
This is the collection of essays that grew out of the annual Socrel conference in Durham in 2009, and features essays on new atheism by Teemu Taira and on retention of fundamentalist beliefs in the context of teaching evolution to school pupils by Ryan Cragun and colleagues.