Why & How We Do What We Do
I saw on social media yesterday that Huston Smith is reported to have passed away. He was 97. Apart from an update on Wikipedia there’s not much news on this on social media yet. […]
Author: Russell McCutcheon
Posts by Russell McCutcheon
“I’m Laughing at Clouds…”
You likely know the scene: a man in love, drops his sweetheart off at her place, then proceeds to sing and dance, despite the inclement weather. […]
Jim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
In the close to Fabricating Origins — a recent collection of short essays, by a wide array of scholars, on the problem of origins — I used the example of Jim and Pam, from the U.S. adaptation of the British series, “The Office,” to illustrate how malleable, and thus useful, the archive of the past can be in our efforts to make sense of where we happen to find ourselves today. For all I know I’ve blogged about it before […]
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Another Annus Horribilis
As the year comes to a close, and while we await the usual roll call of those famous people who died during the past year, I find it curious how 2016 seems to stand out for so many as being a particularly bad year — hence the #Dear2016 hastag. […]
The Rhetorics of Comparison
Yes, I had a root canal the other day. My first. Sure, I have had fillings and even a few crowns but never a root canal. […]
Make It So
Did you catch Titus Hjelm‘s excellent post the other day? His argument concerned the manner in which otherwise routine claims or actions are represented by specific groups, for specific reasons, as controversial; the apparent controversy of some religions (notably, in his post, Islam — at least to a number of people in so-called Western countries) is thus not an essential trait but one that is acquired in the public marketplace. […]
Research Responsibilities Revisited
Some may recall a series of posts from the summer of 2015, on what I saw as the shortcomings of a draft statement of the American Academy of Religion on their members’ research responsibilities. Their draft document was then the basis for a session at the AAR’s 2015 annual meeting, in Atlanta that year, and a final version of the document was then produced and passed, early in 2016, by the AAR Board. Until recently I wasn’t aware of where […]
We’re All Freelancers
In this day of increasingly corporatized higher ed, where we sometimes interact with students through the medium of learning management systems, and in which scholars’ relationships with publishers is equally mediated through online submission systems, it’s worth mulling over for who benefits from such systems. For whom are they designed and to what effect? […]
Celebrate Good Times
Yes, this semester we’re celebrating our Department’s 50th anniversary. If you’re interested in some of the historical background, then see this post from this past August. The short story is that UA’s Department of Religious Studies dates to 1932, as best we can tell, but only in 1966-7 did the university — just like public universities all across the US — make the changes necessary for students to study religion in a manner that satisfied the requirements of the US […]
Making the Strange Familiar
Have you seen The Carbonaro Effect? It’s a TV show where an undercover magician does tricks in settings where people don’t expect to see magic performed, and we get to watch their reaction. Maybe he’s working at a cash register in a grocery store and finds a live chick in the dozen eggs you’re buying or maybe he’s someone you meet in the break room at work who pulls an incredible amount of food from his little lunch bag, along […]