A recent development, reported here, nicely illustrates the socio-political function of privacy, e.g., the (once?) widespread notion that those claims on behavior that were said to be premised on religious belief are merely a private affair concerning faith, sentiment, etc. For now this once common presumption is being troubled — inasmuch as the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be gradually dismantling it, in favor of allowing (just some) such claims to warrant exemptions from federal law. But once this notion […]
Category: Religion in Culture
Posts in this category discuss how those aspects of culture known as religion can be studied in a way comparable to all other cultural practices.
How We Encouraged Iraqi Sectarianism
A graduate of the department recently highlighted an intriguing Washington Post blog discussing the turmoil in Iraq. Avoiding the simplistic notions of blame (the Bush administration’s invasion or the Obama administration’s withdrawal of troops) that often depend on one’s own ideological perspective, the post develops a more nuanced historical narrative. […]
How Do You Define “Minister”?
In light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which “closely held,” for-profit corporations now seem to have religious rights, it raises some questions about the extent to which employers can determine elements of their employees’ behavior — whether on the job or not. […]
Big R and Little r
I recently wrote a review essay on the current state of scholarship on the category “religion” for the European history of religions journal, Numen (which comes out in 2015, I gather). It was fun to write, since its been 20 years since I first wrote a review essay on the same topic — “just how far have we come?” now becomes the question. […]
Words Matter
This news story reminded me of teaching long ago, and trying to persuade students that “God” was not necessarily a generic, cross-cultural, trans-historical term but, instead, usually carried with it (as do all words) a specific baggage (e.g., the Christian doctrine of trinity, the role of Jesus, specific ideas of heaven and salvation, the bible, etc.) — an argument not that different from trying to persuade students that “man” is not necessarily a universal designator for all human beings (i.e., […]
Out of Bounds
The blokes (that’s the right word, no?) over at The Religious Studies Project posted a link earlier today to an article entitled “The Case Against Mix-and-Match Spirituality” — an article, summarizing a recent session at The Aspen Ideas Festival, that nicely demonstrates how easily (and often) scholars adopt a stance from within the groups they happen to study, thereby taking sides in what are, in fact, local disputes, instead of studying how group members themselves make judgment calls on who […]
The Politics of Misconceptions
In a recent blog post, my colleague, Mike Altman, makes a crucial point; after quoting a site that describes early European scholarship on Buddhism as being based on earlier “misconceptions, he writes: […]
Europeanizing the Buddha and Constructing a World Religion
Have you seen Prof. Altman’s new blog post? Here’s a sampling of what he has to say: “Europeans and Americans conceived of Buddhism as a world religion not because of ‘misconceptions’ that were corrected by ‘better understandings,’ but because it served their purposes within a growing discourse of ‘world religions’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Buddha became European because Europeans imagined him in their own image to serve their own purposes.” Interest piqued? Read the full […]
Read More from Europeanizing the Buddha and Constructing a World Religion
Misdirection
The blogosphere is lighting up in response to yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that some “closely held” corporations can be considered to have “sincerely held religious beliefs” (i.e., those of their owners, of course, and not those of their employees) worth protecting — and, voila, some corporations can now be exempt from certain aspects of federal law due to religious exemptions. (Read the so-called “Hobby Lobby” decision here.) […]
In Our Right Mind
At what point does one invoke notions of “mental illness” when engaging people making reference to “the Holy Spirit” telling them to do things…? […]