Month: January 2014


“Firm Religious Beliefs”

Did you catch the story, the other day, of the Canadian University in which religious identity and gender-inclusion ran straight into each other and the former seems to have prevailed? As reported in the newspaper, The Toronto Star, the story opens: A York University student who refused to do group work with women for religious reasons has sparked a human rights tug-of-war between a professor and campus administration. While the professor wanted to deny the student’s request, a university dean […]

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It Sticks With You

M.G. Proaps graduated from REL in 2013 and then landed in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is currently in the application process for graduate school. It’s pretty safe to say President Obama gets most things he does scrutinized and what he buys at Christmas time would be no exception. Indeed, among many an article analyzing whether it was Obama’s worst year ever or just worst year as president, what he bought at a bookstore seems like a rather modest topic to […]

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The Challenge of the Humanities

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week decrying the shift in English departments away from the classics reflects the challenge that the Humanities faces because Humanities research often creates discomfort. The article specifically used UCLA’s 2011 curriculum change, which no longer requires semester-long courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, favoring courses that focus on issues of gender, class, race, etc., as a symbol of a focus in critical theory on everyone being victims. Her characterization of these courses […]

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On Skepticism

“Maybe those moments of persistence, guidance, motivation, and continuity are actually the moments where religion itself gets constructed. Maybe it’s shape-shifting because it is constantly being rebuilt. But by who? And to what end? These were the questions driving my skepticism.” Seen Prof. Michael Altman‘s latest blog post on the Religion in American History blog? Read more here… […]

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Theory in Practice

Several Facebook friends have recently re-posted this Guardian article, “Why Non-Believers Need Rituals Too.” Its argument is that humanists or atheists or agnostics — or whatever else we name this loosely (if at all) identified group, a group likely comprised by our very talking about it — need to give more attention to the aesthetics of their collective practices. Why? … because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. […]

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