Richard Irvine

Richard Irvine is an anthropologist based in the Department of Religious Studies at The Open Univerity. His PhD on Benedictine Monasticism was from the Division of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he lectured for 5 years. His current research explores the social conditions for enchantment and disenchantment in everyday life, and at the moment, his fieldwork focus is Orkney. | @robotforaday

 

Contributions by Richard Irvine

podcast

Secular Spaces? | Discourse! September 2022

This month's Discourse! centres on questions of the secular and the religious in the contemporary public square. What does it mean to be a secular space? How do institutions "deal with" religious ideas and identities in such a space? We talk about religious bias in universities, how religious spokespeople affect politics, and how religious freedom sometimes trumps other forms of freedom. Tune in with host Jacob Barrett and guests Richard Irvine and Jacob Noblett to learn more!

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podcast

Magic and Modernity

This conversation between Richard Irvine, Theodoros Kyriakides and David G. Robertson concerns magical thinking in the modern world. We may think that such ideas are confined to the fringes in the secular, post-Enlightenment world, but this is not necessarily the case. We talk about Weber's rationalisation and James Frazer's evolutionary model of modernity, and how they relate to ideas of belief, and magic.

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