Have you heard the one about Howard Carson, the amateur archeologist, who, in the year 4022, landed “at the bottom of an ancient shaft,” and then discovers what he decides is “a long-forgotten tomb”? But which readers know to be just the ruins of a motel? […]
In 2001, in a collection of essays, I included a chapter on teaching courses on theories of myth and ritual, describing there how I sometimes use pop music (songs that, with each year, get more and more dated) to make a point. […]
You a fan of “Arrested Development”? If so, you may remember the pilot episode where, during his retirement party, agents from the Securities and Exchange Commission raid the yacht to arrest George Sr. — but his son, G.O.B., the ungifted but enthusiastic amateur magician, hides him in the Aztec Tomb. Moral of the story? Classification matters. Oh, and don’t defraud investors in your real estate development company. […]
Do you know that painting? It’s detail from Norman Rockwell’s 1951, “Saying Grace,” which sold for $46 million a couple years ago. It came to mind after an exchange that I had over on Twitter the other day, in which I wrote the following: The painting nicely illustrates the point — that classification is the trace of a social situation in which difference and similarity are being worked out. For, to break it down to it’s simplest, I’d argue that […]
So opens the Wikipedia article on the sociology of religion (presumably poaching the text straight from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research), echoing the language of the US’s Association for the Sociology of Religion (their journal Sociology of Religion — now in its 76th year — is published by Oxford University Press) whose members, as stated in its Constitution, study: religion in all its social and cultural dimensions. […]
Read More from Forms and Dimensions and Manifestations — Oh My!
Season 4 episode 15 of the TV show Futurama, entitled “The Farnsworth Parabox,” has a great illustration of a principle that Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. […]
There’s an interesting story now making the rounds of the internet, in which Congressman Jeff Duncan (Republican, South Carolina, pictured above) is quoted as saying the following about the Roman Catholic Church’s recent recognition of Palestine as a state: Of course the deep irony is the speed with which a variety of politicians in the US cite their own religious beliefs as evidence for their political positions or how frequently they decry the so-called separation of church and state — […]
I assume that by now you’ve seen either the original video, or the subsequent apology of the principal of TNT Academy in Stone Mountain, Georgia — it concerns an incident at this past Friday’s graduation in which the principal mistakenly ended the ceremony before the valedictorian’s address. In her efforts to call the audience back, to hear his speech, she chastised the people who were standing and leaving, tried to get the venue’s doors closed, called a person a “little […]
When I first came to the US to work, back in 1993, I wasn’t aware of some of the subtle differences between the US and Canada (or at least where I grew up), but I soon discovered a bunch of them. I could talk about the blank stares I’d get if I said “zed” instead of “zee” for the last letter of the alphabet or, instead, I could tell you the story of, early on, asking a student, at the […]
On the weekend I saw the news stories about Columbia University’s bizarre — yes, I’ll just go ahead an label it as such — attempt to ban food services workers from, among other things, speaking Spanish while on the job. The rich irony, at least as posed by one blogger (a Brooklyn College poli sci prof) and then repeated in other online stories, was that while seeking to contain or marginalize lower class workers who might speak Spanish as their […]