Class registration is just around the corner, so advising for the next semesters (Interim, Summer, and Fall 2017) will take place beginning Monday, February 27 and will extend until Tuesday March 7. […]
Month: February 2017
Word and Things: Recovering Theoretical Creativity
Adrian Hermann is Professor of Religion and Society at Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn, Germany. (The introduction to the series is posted here.) The debate that flares up in discussing a book like Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion seems to point to two different ways in which scholars are currently using the category of “religion.” At the same time, however, it seems that the differences between these two options are often not explicitly reflected upon. Instead, each side sees in […]
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Words and Things: Happily Ever After Religion
Richard Newton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College. His scholarship focuses on the anthropology of scriptures. He also curates the student-scholar collaborative blog, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture, and Teaching. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @seedpods. (The introduction to the series is posted here.) Brent Nongbri begins his approach to religious studies with memory of a problem. The problem is his inability to translate the English word, “religion” into the Khasi language of his fatherland. […]
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50th Anniversary Fun Fact #7
Although dating to 1932, in 2016-17 we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary, given how the Department was reinvented in 1966-7 — in keeping with how the study of religion was established then across public universities in the US. No longer confessionally-oriented and staffed by campus ministers, it became a cross-culturally comparative and interdisciplinary field. So all semester we’ll be posting some weekly fun facts from 1966 — not that long ago for some of us yet ancient history for others. […]
Purity and Danger
If you know of the Panera chain of soup & sandwich shops then you might know about their latest marketing campaign — they sell clean food. I guess that means that other menus — those of their competitors in the fast food industry, that is — are populated by, well, dirty food. Apart from the curiously anti-intellectual theme to the campaign (if you can’t easily say the name then it must be bad for you), the initiative makes evident that […]
Words and Things: Modern Concepts, Ancient Interests
Matt Sheedy (Ph.D) lectures in the department of religious studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, and is associate editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. His research interests include critical social theory, theories of secularism, atheism and science v. religion in the public realm, as well as representations of Christianity, Islam, and Native traditions in popular and political culture. His dissertation offers a critical look at Jürgen Habermas’s theory of religion in the public sphere. (The introduction to […]
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On the Right Track
Did you happen to see the job ad posted for a position at the National Humanities Center (in North Carolina)? […]
Words and Things: One or Two Things That I Know About Religion
Anders Klostergaard Petersen is a Professor in the School of Culture and Society in the Department for the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. He works in the areas of second Temple Judaism and early Christianity as well as studying cultural evolution. This post leads off a series of invited posts on the topic of words and things in the study of religion (introduced here). During the last three years two important books have been published highlighting the absence […]
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50th Anniversary Fun Fact #6
Although dating to 1932, in 2016-17 we’re celebrating our 50th anniversary, given how the Department was reinvented in 1966-7 — in keeping with how the study of religion was established then across public universities in the US. No longer confessionally-oriented and staffed by campus ministers, it became a cross-culturally comparative and interdisciplinary field. So all semester we’ll be posting some weekly fun facts from 1966 — not that long ago for some of us yet ancient history for others. […]
Of Words and Things: Introduction to a Guest Series
A longstanding debate across disciplines arose once again at a co-sponsored panel at the conference of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR), last November, during a session (pictured above) devoted to reviewing Brent Nongbri’s recent book, Before Religion. […]
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