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Author: Russell McCutcheon

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Posts by Russell McCutcheon

Digital Religious Studies

If you’ve followed our Department then you might know about our new MA, which started this Fall. While it’s focused on helping students develop their social theory skills, it also has a focus on the digital skills that have become increasingly relevant in scholarship — whether to communicate with wider audiences, via a variety of online projects (what might be called the public humanities), or to enhance the traditional research that we do. That’s why every incoming group of grad […]

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Components of What?

One of our grad students has pointed out a problem with a recent article that we read in our Department’s monthly journal group; Sarah wrote: Although titled “Durkheim with Data,” it seemed as though the creators of this project have not critically considered or defined the very categories they have opted to work within… I think this is a pretty keen insight, for when I first read the article I was struck by a passage on p. 323, coming after […]

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Looking Over and Overlooking

Thanks @McCutcheonSays for this mention of my online syllabus, in his discussion of Janet Jakobsen’s piece on relhttps://t.co/EkJiVE3hPM — Malory Nye (@malorynye) October 1, 2017 Malory Nye’s tweet, the other day, got me thinking… So I replied: For a while, now, I’ve had this feeling: as happens with any new and successfully reproduced social developments (or what advocates just call advances), newcomers to the group tend to normalize them. Which is a wonderful luxury, if you think about it — […]

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Grist for the Millstone

I recall a conference, quite some years ago, where, as part of a panel discussion, I was once called “a vulgar Smithian”; it was a criticism that responded to my interest in the category “religion” itself, thus linking me to Jonathan Z.’s often-cited (and, these days, often-criticized) claim from the opening to his 1982 essay collection, Imagining Religion: … while there is a staggering amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture […]

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What Gets Labeled as Religion

Still not quite sure what scholars study when they say that they study the classification or the category religion itself…? Think that all scholars of religion need a definition of religion to get started with their work? If so, why not give a listen to episode 21, that was just posted the other day. It’s a short podcast by Malory Nye, author of a widely used intro book in our field, and he elaborates on the simple fact that he’s […]

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“We Could Only Resort to Prayer…”

There was an interesting story on the radio the other day — in which a Roman Catholic bishop in the Philippines described how they’re now ringing church bells every evening to raise awareness about the brutality of the ongoing drug war in his country. Give it a listen (go here if the embed doesn’t work): What caught my ear, and prompted me to bring this story to the attention of my Theory of Religion seminar the other day, was how […]

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“What Do I Talk About At the Job Interview?”

I’ve written a number of blog posts over the years about the skills that students in the academic study of religion acquire. It’s worth thinking about because too many people seem focused only on the content of an undergrad degree, assuming that the thing that you study is the thing that you’ll do. It’s an effect of the longstanding professionalization of the university, of course (whereby specialties once reserved for separate, two-year colleges or tech schools moved into the university […]

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