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Author: Russell McCutcheon

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Posts by Russell McCutcheon

No One Has a Monopoly on Teaching Critical Thinking

Yesterday my colleague Steven Ramey posted about a recent study of those who took the 2013 Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) — their undergraduate GPA, their undergraduate major, and their LSAT score. The means for each major were then graphed (above), with undergrad GPA on the vertical axis and LSAT score on the horizontal, making Classics majors (far top right corner) the highest preforming by both measures. But you may notice that Religious Studies majors are also near the front […]

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Working Miracles

Did you catch Bart Ehrman’s interview about his new book on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” the other day? No? Then have a listen. While there’s lots here to consider if we want to entertain what a truly critical, historical study of religion might look like, what a critical approach to how we talk about the past would look like — one that avoids anachronism, as if we can read back present day identities into the dim past — and […]

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Making Strange

With the release of “Noah” in theaters across the U.S. on the day that I’m writing this, an old thought occurred to me: wouldn’t it be interesting to use popular movies as a way to entertain how to see “their” local as “they” might see it? For the familiarity that we attribute to stories about, say, talking to burning bushes or feeding throngs with a few fishes and loaves is surely comparable to how familiar other people surely consider the […]

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Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

Are you following the case in the U.S. that’s now being argued before the Supreme Court, on whether a corporation has religious freedom protections? It involves a chain of over 600 craft supply stores, in 47 states, and whether, under the new health care law (commonly known as “Obamacare”), it is required by the federal government to pay for certain forms of birth control that the owners of the corporation claim their religious beliefs lead them to understand as abortion. […]

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“It Doesn’t Matter What I Say”

On p. 3, near the opening of the late Frits Staal’s classic essay, “The Meaningless of Ritual” (Numen [1979] 26: 2-22), he wrote: Contrary to how most of us see it, for Staal, ritual was not referential, i.e., it’s not that one does this because it means this or represents that. While the meaning surely comes later, in hindsight, often taught to us by others, when one is doing ritual one is instead obsessed with sheer form, not content; one […]

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“I Shouldn’t Have to Say It!”

Over the years I’ve found that the best way to illustrate what seems to be either complex or nuanced notions is to start with an easy example, maybe something students can identify with, perhaps a seemingly mundane or common instance, and then to build from there. The bonus of this method is that you also make evident that no item of culture is ever as simple as it may seem. […]

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Probing the Problematic Polls

A few days ago I posted on Facebook and asked when someone was going to tackle a dissertation on the Pew Charitable Trust or its research wing, and the way in which their seemingly objective polling is actually constituting a very particular sort of social world into which it is trying to fit the entire population of the globe. And voila, here’s a piece of data for that hypothetical dissertation: an article from the New York Review of Books on […]

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