If you were paying attention to US news this past week it was probably tough not to know that the Senate trial of President Trump concluded with him being acquitted by a vote that pretty much went along straight party lines. I say pretty much because a lone Republican Senator, Mitt Romney, from Utah, voted to convict. The reason Romney’s vote stood out for some scholars of religion on social media was likely the manner in which he couched his […]
Tag: Faith
A Strategic Political Tool
Did you watch the town hall meeting the other night, the second of this season’s Presidential debates? Because scholars of religion are trained in the study of how rhetorics of privacy are used by social actors, I think we might have more to say about what’s going on than we at first realize. […]
They Were Right to Boo
Did you see Ted Cruz’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention? Maybe you heard about this morning — if you’re following the US Presidential race, that is. He had a prime spot and ended his speech with a few words that caused him to get resoundingly booed. […]
Agency, Structure, and the Myth of the Immaculate Perception
National Public Radio on the weekend played a story (an interview with Neal Gabler, the author of an Atlantic article on the same topic) about how hard many in the US have it economically. […]
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“But as a businessman, there are things you do for business…”
If you’re interested in how people use rhetoric or how they divide and classify social space in order to make a more persuasive image of the world that’s conducive to their interests, then give a listen to this interview that aired yesterday morning. (Or click here if the player doesn’t load properly.) […]
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What It Gives With One Hand….
I found this over at the Huffington Post this morning — an announcement for a new HarvardX (part of edX) course on religious literacy. The course is described as follows: […]
Of Prepositions and Conjunctions
The following is slightly adapted from the REL webpage’s description of the Department motto. Although it may seem to some to be a rather minor thing, and therefore something easily overlooked, our department’s motto — Studying Religion in Culture — italicizes the preposition “in” (not something we’re able to note here in the WordPress blog title, though). We’ve written it this way for close to 15 years, to draw attention to the fact that the conjunction in the more common […]
A Fine Place to Start
By Joe Kimbrough Joe Kimbrough graduated from the Department of Religious Studies in 2008. He went on to pursue graduate study in Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama, while maintaining his interests in the historical divisions between church and academy. You can read some of his other blog posts here. Recently, I sought a diversion after working some overtime, so I stopped at the local Barnes & Noble. Such a decision was popular that evening since the store […]
Making the Familiar Strange
A theme I’ve written on a time or two before is the inability (or unwillingness) of many scholars to entertain that, being themselves members of a particular social group, they tend to draw upon folk concepts popular among their own group and then project them outward (in space and time), as if they are universals that name and describe stable self-evidencies in the world at large. While we probably have no choice but to know the new by means of […]
Big R and Little r
I recently wrote a review essay on the current state of scholarship on the category “religion” for the European history of religions journal, Numen (which comes out in 2015, I gather). It was fun to write, since its been 20 years since I first wrote a review essay on the same topic — “just how far have we come?” now becomes the question. […]