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Posts by Russell McCutcheon

The Tremendous Irony of it All

Last week there was some chatter online about the nominations put forward for the leadership of our field’s main professional association. (Question: why does the nominating committee exercise a monopoly on determining the organization’s leadership?) Apart from a variety of posts on Facebook and Twitter, the blogs I saw were those by Mike Altman, Aaron Hughes, Finbarr Curtis, and Elesha Coffman. They’re all well worth reading. The issue, for some, seems to be that the VP nominees are both Christian […]

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All the While Sipping Small Cups of Good Coffee

Back in December 2014 I received an unexpected email from Switzerland: We would like to invite you to a master class with PhD candidates and Post-Docs in 2015. These master classes are a main element of our program: For two or three days, we would like to discuss your work, approaches to the study of religion and give the participants the chance to discuss their projects with you. I agreed and am just back from three intensive days working with […]

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“Who said names were supposed to be easy to say? What are you, a candy bar?”

Students in REL 237 are watching Avalon this week, a 1990 film about the changes that take place within a family of early to mid-20th century Americans who, like so many of our ancestors, came to this continent from somewhere else. “I came to America in 1914…, by way of Philadelphia. That’s where I got off the boat,” says Sam, one of the film’s protagonists, recollecting an epic past for the grandchildren. One of the reasons that I like using […]

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Historic Artifact? An Open Letter to Department Search Committees from 1997

The following (co-written with my then co-editor at the now defunct Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, the late Tim Murphy), first appeared as an open letter in our inaugural issue (26/1 [1997]) and was then reproduced as the appendix to chapter 6 of The Discipline of Religion (2003).  Though many things about the academic labor market may have changed over the past 20 years (e.g., many universities have moved to online application systems, complete […]

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Applying Skills Outside the Classroom

In some of our courses faculty in the department focus on the problem of definition in the study of religion — what counts as a religion (more importantly, for whom) and what are the practical implications of distinguishing a this from a that. They also often talk about the broad relevance of the skills that students acquire in the Humanities. So I had all this in mind while listening to a story on National Public Radio this morning, on making […]

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Factual Assertion or Persuasive Argumentation?

I finally got around to reading Tom Tweed’s recent Journal of Religion essay the other day, “After the Quotidian Turn: Interpretive Categories and Scholarly Trajectories in the Study of Religion Since the 1960s.” I’ve got a paper of my own in which I argue that we should turn our attention toward studying what I’ll just call the common, so I thought I should see what Tom had to say — those who advocate for studying so-called everyday religion, such as […]

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