Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?
How do you know it’s the year end? Well… […]
Author: Russell McCutcheon
Posts by Russell McCutcheon
“Well, Somehow…”
Have you seen the new 1:25 video from Bill Nye, the science guy, explaining evolutionary theory with Emoji? It’s kind’a curious since it is clearly meant to persuade people inasmuch as it says complex things both fun and simply — hence the emojis popping in and swooshing and out — as if anti-evolutionary positions are inspired by their lack of understanding of complex matters. But here’s where, in the first 20 seconds, attempts like this fail… […]
Normalizing Surveillance By Critiquing It
So read the headline on The Washington Post‘s style blog — the article argued as follows: Ok. I admit to finding this whole elf on the shelf thing kind’a odd…. […]
“Brotherhood, Peace, and Let Loose with their Money”
With the Christian holiday season upon us, and the inevitable media coverage of the so-called “war on Christmas,” it’s worth remembering Lynch v. Donnelly (465 U.S. 668) — a US Supreme Court case from 1984 in which the city of Pawtucket, RI, was sued over the annual nativity scene that it erected, at (admittedly minimal) public expense each year in the downtown shopping area. […]
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An Interview with Ann Taves
An interview with Prof. Ann Taves has just been posted — she is a former President of the American Academy of Religion and is well known for her work on religious experience as well as her interest in applying the finding from cognitive psychology to the study of religion. She’s now at work on a new book, Revelatory Events: Unusual Experiences and New Spiritual Paths, and supervising the interdisciplinary Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM) Lab Group at the University of […]
“Well I Guess the Biggest Question Would Be Why…”
“It is the fact that we have been preoccupied for a long time with finding in this seamless web of human activities the capacity to break one out and say ‘When they’re doing that one they’re doing religion’…” Watch the video here: This interview with Prof. Smith was conducted by Prof. Alfred F. Benney, of Fairfield University, while attending the annual AAR/SBL in Boston, MA, on November 21, 1999. […]
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Time to Put Whose Feet Up?
Random thought on a holiday weekend: What does it say about us that we use pretty much the same terse phrase when describing death as we do when keeping the housekeeping staff out of our hotel rooms? […]
Wafer Thin Mint Veneer
As I mentioned briefly yesterday in a post, I was recently a respondent on a panel at our field’s main annual conference; the panel was devoted to whether there could be a consolidation of different trends in inter-religious/interfaith dialogue. Now, this is not what I work on and, as I made plain in my response, my own work would take those who aim toward identifying so-called mutual understanding across religions as being themselves an object of study, inasmuch as it […]
Common, Yes, But Also Compelling
Having just come from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, where scholars of religions’ input on the topic of climate change was encouraged, inasmuch as we are presumed to have some special expertise based on what we happen to study — as phrased in a memo sent last year to the chairs of its various program units, written by our then incoming President: It is our scholarly duty, I would argue, that we bring forward a scholarship […]
All Work and No Play…
We’re experimenting with a new feature in our Department this year: Live Tweets form the Lounge. For we’re now on Twitter, and it occurred to us that periodically inviting a different faculty member to just hang out in our Department lounge for an hour and tweet about what’s going on, what they’re teaching this semester, or what they’re working on in their own research might be a way to engage students or any other Twitter followers. It’s fun, sure, but it’s […]