When it comes to media and the study of religion, Travis Cooper says “scholars need to ask more compelling questions, moving beyond overly simplistic binaries and dualisms to think in terms of scales and networks, degrees and systems, connection and difference.”
Mark Q. Gardiner and Steven Engler reply to our interview with Bradley Onishi focuses on the view from Philosophy. “The divergence between Weber and Onishi,” they write, “need not be understood as a fight over where to place borders, but rather of adopting different configurations of the semantic web—a difference which, we might note, is only visible against the background of a good deal of overlap elsewhere.”
If one identifies the secularization thesis as the status quo against which contemporary scholars of religion are to rebel, then even the most critical and generative analysis will leave secularism in a default position of hostility against religion.
After Espinoza v Montana, the U.S. commitment to church/state separation, which has been the strongest in the school context, no longer may be assured, writes Martha McCarthy in this week’s featured response.
“The aims of autoethnography—careful, creative, and responsible deployment of personal narrative as an illuminating force in the study of the cultural and the political—align with those of Onishi’s Straight White American Jesus in his attempt to avoid “reduction and demonization [of evangelicals]” while maintaining “the courage and the audacity to point as critical and unflinching of an eye on what’s happening.””
Students in religious studies (and students of faith) understand that religion is a social institution with history, structure, and function. So they have a particular advantage in seeing the social capital of religious groups and how it can be leveraged.
Professor Jerry Espinoza Rivera’s fascinating reflections on recent shifts Latin American conservatism underscore both the dominance and the fragility of secularism in the democracies of the western hemisphere. One can hardly imagine a better example of the triumph of secularity in public life than this account. The authors Rivera discusses, and the networks they represent, have obviously learned their lesson: Science is the pathway to truth. Science delivers certitude. Science provides the heft needed to
Librarian Garrett Trott explains the value of editors and the peer-review process in this week’s response to the 2019 EASR publishers panel. “Build upon [their] critique and comments,” Trott advises, while also altering authors to issues of access to scholarship addressed by newer open access publishing models.
From Jonathan Z. Smith we learned that “religion is not its own genus of human activity, but a species of it,” writes Willi Braun in this response to Andie Alexander’s interview with Aaaron Hughes at the “Thinking With Jonathan Z. Smith” Conference in Trondheim earlier in 2019.
“As a particularly dramatic account in the early history of signs and sanctity, [the Chiara] episode highlighted the importance of context,” writes Cynthia Klestinec in response to Sidney Castillo’s interview with Gabor Klaniczay. There we see “how the local context of Chiara served to establish claims to sanctity in the early 1300s and how the more extensive context of the Counter Reformation generated an overlapping but ultimately different set of debates about those same signs in the 1650s.”
Looking back on the last 60 years, we can see clearly “the influence of the Catholic neoconservatives throughout the Americas and the world,” writes Jesse Russell in this response to our October 21st podcast with Jerry Espinoza Rivera.
Santa Muerte is a death saint with a rich history and reflects the deep interplay of cultures and devotional practices in Mexico.
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