Author’s cat providing pictorial representation of “‘Unbelief’: comfortable enough for now, probably need to move away from it eventually”
For the past few years, the term “unbelief” has made me academically disquieted in a way I’ve never quite been able to place.
This week we’re doing some a little different with the format of the response. Rather than have a single respondent to the interview, we opened up the opportunity to several students from the University of Edinburgh’s Religious Studies Masters program to have a stab at writing their own.
Cognitive Science of Religion has sometimes been criticized for lack of empirical support. Jonathan Jong went as far as claiming that some theories are ‘notoriously under-determined by data’.
Margarita Simon Guillory’s interview presents me with an opportunity to revisit a major question in the study of African American religion(s). That is: How do we name and theorize the practice of combining different belief systems to create a unique new religion?
It is a rather odd experience to be writing a response to a podcast in which I participated, along with Graham Harvey, Paul François Tremlett, James Cox, Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Jonathan Jong. This was a roundtable discussion held at the 2017 British Association for the Study of Religion…
In Professor Brian S. Turner’s RSP podcast interview with Sammy Bishop, a rallying cry for the relevance of sociology of religion rang out. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was the rush to understand Islamic terrorism that re-centred the study of religion in the social sciences. Now, Turner argues,…
Considering the title of her podcast, I was hoping that Dr Susan Palmer would speak about children in all New Religious Movements (NRM). Instead, I found myself immersed in a discussion about children in more problematic groups such as Hari Krishna, the New Unification Church, Children of God, 12 Tribes, Mormon Polygamists, and Scientology.
In his interview with the RSP, George Chryssides considers a prominent methodological challenge for scholars of New Religious Movements (NRMs) – how to approach the narratives of former members of NRMs in an academic context.
Ex-member narratives can cover a variety of issues relating to NRMs, ranging from reasons why certain members joined and left the movement, to intricate details involving esoteric practices that are unknown to outsiders.
Melissa Crouch’s recent edited volume Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging is a very welcome addition to the dialogue on Buddhist-Muslim relations in Southeast Asia. In the podcast Melissa alludes to a particular phenomenon around South and Southeast Asia.
One of the most challenging and enlightening aspects of my fieldwork among the Adi of Arunachal Pradesh, India, in the far eastern Himalayan foothills, has been considering the concept of ‘indigenous religions’: as a phrase, as a classification, as a rallying point for activism.
The title of the interview intrigued me: beyond ‘faith-based organizations’. I have always considered Erica Bornstein to be one of the pioneers in the anthropology of faith-based organizations in the fields of development and humanitarianism.
This week we’re doing something a little bit different. Instead of a written response to the podcast we have a video response instead:
For my take on James Spickard’s phenomenology see: “Prolegomena to a Philosophical Phenomenology of Religion: a critique of sociological phenomenology”.
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