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Author: Russell McCutcheon

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Posts by Russell McCutcheon

Crisis? What Crisis?

An interesting article appeared online at the New York Times‘ site back in June (thanks to a friend for sharing a link to it today), making the following argument: Might the so-called crisis in the humanities be a function of increasing opportunities for women across technical, business, and scientific professions once closed to them, thereby disproportionately forcing female students of the past decades into the so-called more cultured fields thought to be housed in the humanities? A limited option no […]

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Border Patrol

Seen this article? Students in our Department read anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, philosophers, along with scholars of religion, to name just a few of the other fields that we regularly draw on in carrying out our work. So what do you think the implications of this cross-disciplinary work are for our field — is it interdisciplinary at its core? Are we valued by those in other fields? Or maybe the better question is: What fields are not interdisciplinary […]

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Hocus Pocus

Have you seen this clip making the rounds on the internet? Despite it being an ad for a movie (sigh — everything’s an ad for something, no?) and assuming that the unassuming people depicted in it really were unassuming, then their reactions raise a curious question for those who rather confidently distinguish between domains we call religion and science based on the latter being rational and modern and the former not. […]

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Research and or versus Teaching?

Have you been following higher ed issues in the UK? Apart from debates over the role of public vs. private education and over the cost of education, the most recent is a debate over the portion of time a professor spends doing research vs. teaching, with the presumption of some being that research takes time away from teaching. The assumption seems to be that universities are all about teaching and that research can sometimes (always?) get in the way. […]

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Bargain Experiences

Like many scholars of religion in the US (or North American, or maybe even the world?), I got a personalized mass email this morning (you’d think that would be a contradiction in terms, no?), about one of (if not the, as an editor for one of the large publishers once phrased it to me) bestselling world religions textbooks that’s been on the market for the past decades: the 9th edition of the $135.20 (SRP*) Living Religions (now with the Oxy-boost […]

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STEM Myths

From the “your undergrad degree does not necessarily determine your life’s trajectory” files comes this interesting article on the much headlined (but, according to this author’s research, mythic) shortage of STEM researchers (STEM = science, technology, engineering, and math). Apart from little agreement in the literature on just what constitutes STEM disciplines and employment areas, the article finds: […]

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Please (Don’t) Take One

In 2005 I had the good fortune to attend a conference in Japan. Out exploring a little corner of the city one afternoon, I crossed one of those stereotypically busy Tokyo intersections that you sometimes see in the movies — me, my friend Willi, and hundreds of other people — and, on the side we were all heading toward, I spied two clean-cut, blond-haired young white guys in white shirts, black pants, and conservative ties, standing side-by-side and handing out […]

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