There’s been lots of web traffic in the past 24 hours about the colors of a certain dress. You’ve seen it, right? While it’s kind’a curious, and while its sort’a neat that my wife and I both differ on what it’s colors are, what I think is even more important to note is that so many people are so freaked out over this. “Now I see blue and black,” says a student right outside my office, as I type this […]
In October of 2013 I wrote a post elsewhere on how recent advances in the study of religion — studying so-called lived or material religion and religion on the ground — were but new names for a very old way of studying religion; for although many now opt for more empirically-sounding “embodiment” over what we once called “manifestation,” there’s still the presumption that the material is merely the domain in which the immaterial is projected, whether we call the intangible […]
It’s National Adjunct Walkout Day, during which university instructors who are not part of the tenure-track system (or even those who are) may not be showing up to teach or, instead, may take this opportunity to have a “teach-in” during which they depart from the regularly scheduled material, to whatever extent, so as to ensure their students understand some of the challenges facing higher ed at this particular moment in history. It’s a snow day here at the University of […]
I’m giving a test this week and, predictably, it’s worth a certain percentage of the students’ final grades in the class — which reminds me of a much earlier experience I had when students in my intro course complained that my syllabus was only out of 100 possible points when their other courses were worth 715 points or maybe 864 points, or sometimes even more! Who was I to limit their chances by making my course out of only 100? […]
Do you know about the sometimes outspoken Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist much associated with the so-called “new atheist” movement? Well, he’s got a new book out, published last Fall. […]
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Did you hear about the White House summit this past week? It was in the news a fair bit and was on “countering violent extremism” — not just those attributed to Muslims but, because such adjectives as Islamic or Jihadist are often glued pretty tightly, at least in some North American and European media and politics, to the words violence or terrorism, that angle on the event has received a lot of attention. […]
There’s an interesting study to be written on the shifting tides, over the past fifteen years, in the representation of Islam in North America. Case in point: take the above article, posted just days ago. It deviates in significant ways from the rhetoric that was mobilized immediately after the 9-11 attacks, in which the legitimacy of the attackers’ religion was quickly called into question, thereby creating a zone of peaceful and tolerant Muslims who were seen as safe and who […]
So ends the late Charles J. Adams‘s classic entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica on the topic of “Classification of Religions.” Or consider the Encyclopedia of Religion‘s own entry on the same topic (not updated in the second edition), this time written by the late Harry B. Partin — which concludes as follows: […]
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Did you catch this Canadian news story today? I’ve heard it discussed on the radio all morning, during each half hour news update, and what’s curious is how National Public Radio’s report just phrased it: according to investigators, it was the plan of “a group of murderous misfits, not Islamic terrorists,” as the newsreader just said. […]
The following guest post is an English translation of the editorial from the current issue of Asdiwal (vol. 9 [2014]), reproduced here with the kind permission of the journal. It is currently among the very few systematic statements on this topic from within our field and therefore deserves to be read and discussed more widely in North America. Learn more about this academic periodical in the study of religion, published in Geneva, Switzerland, here. As we were preparing this edition […]
Read More from Charlie and Us: Religious Violence and the History of Religions