Tag: Aaron Hughes


And I nominate…

It’s not news that, over the years, I’ve critiqued our main professional organization on various occasions. I’ve been a member for a while now, and it seems to me that having a stake in the profession, and in an association that one’s membership dues helps to fund, means that one is free to offer commentary where one thinks things could (and should) be otherwise. Maybe we could even go so far as say it’s an engaged member’s duty. […]

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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 10: Peer Review

This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. As with the eighth and ninth points of the draft document, the tenth also strikes me as unproductively redundant: For while the previous two were both concerned with scholars talking plainly to wide audiences, this bullet point focuses on that too, but narrows […]

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Rant, Screed, or Valid Critique?

Dictionarily, the difference between a screed and a rant is the difference between written and oral discourse. What joins them together is a certain angry compulsion to “get the word out”, “wake up the lethargic” and/or, not without a certain brazenness, “right the wrong”. All-too-often, the words chosen are themselves hostile, and, rather than engaging the reader or listener, they serve to close the very doors they were originally intended, perhaps, to open. Not so with Professor Aaron Hughes’s latest […]

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