Theologies That Cannot Be: A Response to the RSP Interview with Dr. Caroline Blyth
Every discipline has both power and responsibility to contribute to the dismantling of the Patriarchy by declaring its valorization of avarice, egotism, and violence to be wrong. The particular duty and power of religious studies and theology, is to point out that that valorization is hypocritical—that the culture of Patriarchy is itself inimical to the values of the sacred social order from which it claims its authority and for which it claims to offer protection
Opportunities Digest – 3 January 2017
Do you have a call for papers, an event announcement, a job vacancy, grant or award you would like others to distribute?
How about having your notification posted with the Religious Studies Project’s weekly Opportunities Digest? It’s easy,
Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest – 20 December 2016
Do you have a call for papers, an event announcement, a job vacancy, grant or award you would like others to distribute?
How about having your notification posted with the Religious Studies Project’s weekly Opportunities Digest? It’s easy,
Religious Studies Project Opportunities Digest – 29 November 2016
Do you have a call for papers, an event announcement, a job vacancy, grant or award you would like others to distribute?
How about having your notification posted with the Religious Studies Project’s weekly Opportunities Digest? It’s easy,
What is Right With Pagan Studies?
For all our talk of religion being a human endeavor, we are unaccountably unaccustomed to thinking of it as one; we treat it as an abstract phenomenon that can be subjected to a passably “objective” study, like thermodynamics or photosynthesis.Ethan Doyle White’s interview with the RSP is a fascinating follow-on to While Taira seeks a new paradigm of religious studies that does not require definition of “religion,” …
Troubling Essentialism: Studying Religion and Feminism
Secular feminist scholars would benefit from understanding ‘religion’ as a category without set boundaries, and from studying religion as ‘lived’ within fluid contexts.In her interview with the Religious Studies Project, Dawn Llewellyn gives a succinct and well-considered account of the ‘tricky relationship’ between feminism and religion. Tackling two such wide-ranging topics, their various definitions,
An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion
What is the sociology of religion? What are its particular concerns, dominant themes and defining methodologies? Where did it begin, and how has it evolved? This interview with Grace Davie, the first in our BSA SOCREL series, introduces this important and historically influential approach to the study of religion.
The Deconstruction of Religion: So What?
Scholars who deconstruct without re-construction undertake a feeble version of deconstruction that undermines itself (often without realising it).In his interview with the RSP, Teemu Taira refers to his work as in some sense a response to Kevin Schilbrack’s 2013 paper, “After We Deconstruct ‘Religion’, Then What?” However, I don’t find it speaking to the concerns of Schilbrack’s paper. This, is not to question the excellence of Taira’s work, scholarship, or methodology, all of which I am deeply impressed with.
Global(ized) religion and the study of religious tensions
This interview with global studies pioneer Mark Juergensmeyer takes on his keynote address at the 2016 Eastern International Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (EIR-AAR) at the University of Pittsburgh. He interrogates the intersections of different religions traditions, …
Futures Found Wanting
Figured as discursive objects, both the witch and the UFO exceeded (or were thought to exceed) the epistemic capacities of contemporary knowledge, necessitating the creation of new forms of knowing.In her recent book on confession and witchcraft in early modern France, French Studies scholar Virginia Krause argues that early modern demonology was a ‘science of the night’.The activities of the Devil, and of the witches who served him, occurred in the darkest hours,…
Ours Can Be To Reason Why
While perspectives about conversion are Christian-centric, the idea of conversion itself is religion-centric.Lynn Davidman’s recent RSP interview illustrates why her work is important, serious, and engaging. As I listened to the podcast, three ideas came to mind.
First, I was delighted to hear Davidman describe much of the literature on conversion and deconversion as Christian-centric. While I think she could have made this point even more compellingly in the podcast, …
Historicism, Reflexivity, and Our Discourses on Theory: Or, Why Lacan Is Not a Garnish
Theory, from this perspective, is not something that’s added to a world that is already fully present to us; on the contrary, the things are after-effects of the theory.
In this interview, Adam Miller speaks with Kathryn Lofton and John Modern about their new book series with University of Chicago Press, titled Class 200: New Studies in Religion.
DEATH, Religion, and Terror Management Theory
Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Jong draws on experimental research utilizing terror management theory to discuss the role of religious and other worldviews in assuaging the fear of the inevitable—DEATH.
One year before his own death in 1790, Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to the French scientist Jean-Baptiste,
Tom Wagner
Tom Wagner joined the Reid School of Music in June 2014. He holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Royal Holloway University and an MMus in ethnomusicology from Goldsmiths College. Additionally, he holds a Masters in Percussion Performance from Rutgers University and a Bachelors in Percussion Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Before moving […]
Making Space for the Better Book
There is the perception that critical scholarship will not get a fair hearing, and there is a perception that theological or confessional scholarship is incapable of being fair.
A number of years ago I attended a keynote lecture during a national religious studies conference at which an esteemed professor declared in exasperated tones; “What Have They Done To My Buddhism?!” The tension in the room, rising during his overtly confessional presentation, reached a silent crescendo at this exclamation. Even I, as a (very) junior scholar of religion, …