Which Voice Speaks?
Russell McCutcheon writes that the ongoing scholarly issues raised by critical theorists about the category of religion, reflected by McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald and others, reflect the reality that “old habits die hard because they are situated within larger contexts that organize our sense of who we are in relation to others.” This includes “discourses on religion” which “many scholars seem to have no choice but to continue to see as self-evident in their meaning and application”
BASR 2019: The State of the Discipline
Vivian Asimos and Theodora Wildcroft took the opportunity to ask the delegates of BASR 2019 what inspired them about the conference theme, their opinion about major trends in the discipline, and how they were personally feeling about REF 2021.
The Politics of Religious Freedom and the Criminalization of Blackness
Bishop Brathwaite’s story points out to us the degree to which the ghostly histories of enslaved and colonized peoples continue to haunt the present from the graves of colonial infrastructures and through repurposed modes of colonial regulation. We can include in this the category of religion and its promised freedom as sites for such hauntings as well
Vestal Nike and the Corporate Profit/Prophet
The vacuum created by the blatant abuses of power by suddenly illegitimate authorities has exposed the spiritual needs of starving Americans, from sea to shining sea.
Scrape My Barrel! | Mid-Year Special 2017 (with video)
This 2017 mid-year special’s game “Scrape My Barrel”—which has absolutely no connection to the popular BBC gameshow “Call My Bluff”—features two teams of religious studies scholars pitted against each other in a battle of definitions, pedantry, creativity, deception, performance and ‘wit’. Tune in to find out whether the ‘established’ scholars (George Chryssides, Dawn Llewellyn, and Paul-François Tremlett) or the ‘up-and-coming’ baristas… sorry, RS scholars (Vivian Asimos, Liam Sutherland, and Amy Whitehead) win bragging rights this year!
Messengers of Many Gods: A Response to the RSP Interview with Tehri Utriainen
Angels don’t just make esotericism accessible to Christians; they make the legacy of Christian thought and active dialogue with the Christian world accessible to people who have often left both on bad terms, and would not otherwise be willing or able to engage with them.
Sociology of Religion and Religious Studies: Disciplines, Fields, and the Limits of Dialogue
As it happens, just two and a half weeks ago, I was in the audience of a panel called ‘Rethinking Theory, Methods, and Data: A Conversation between Religious Studies and Sociology of Religion’ presented at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion.
How to solve a problem like World Religions? An interdisciplinary approach.
Challenging this simplistic conception of religion and its consequences lies at the core of the Critical Religion movement. Schaefer’s interview is an invitation to explore how we can do that most effectively. How do we translate critical insights that have significant real world implications into ideas that can easily be transmitted to students and the wider public?
Communism and Catholicism: Religion and Religious Studies in Lithuania
What is the religious field like in a country where religion was banned for half of the 20th century? And how do you set up a Religious Studies department there? Under Communism, religion was suppressed in the formerly Catholic Eastern European country of Lithuania until the 1990s.
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,…
UFOs, Conspiracy Theories… and Religion?
Area 51, Ancient Aliens, endemic child abuse at the BBC, and Reptilians,… This interview begins with David’s own journey to this research field, before considering some basic questions such as “what is a conspiracy theory?”
Music, Marketing and Megachurches
Music is a big part of a new “mediapolois”, part of a marketing matrix of people, places and industries. Today, music’s meaning is more often part of a branded ecosystem, not limited to entertainment, but part of the experience of everyday life, including religion.
Video Games and Religious Studies
The project of legitimating new cultural commodities into the canon of interpretative objects can be lengthy process. In this interview with University of North Carolina at Greensboro Associate Professor Greg Grieve, video games are presented as a content moving from the margins to the center of the intersection of religion and popular culture.
Teaching and Learning in Contemporary Religious Studies
Today we are joined by Dr Dominic Corrywright of Oxford Brookes University in the UK, to discuss current developments in higher education pedagogy, the challenges and opportunities that these present for Religious Studies, and some practical examples from Dominic’s own experience.
Dominic Corrywright
Dominic Corrywright is Principal Lecturer for Quality Assurance, Enhancement and Validations, and Course Coordinator for Religion and Theology at Oxford Brookes. Alongside other research interests, including alternative spiritualities and new religious movements, Dominic has a strong research focus on teaching and learning in higher education, and pedagogy in the study of religions. He is Teaching & […]