I just saw this New York Times blog post, thanks to The Religious Studies Project’s post on its Facebook wall. The photographer, Jim Estrin, is quoted as follows: “The challenge for me is capturing the essence of an invisible event”… […]
Category: Relevance of Humanities
Posts in this category discuss the wider relevance of those tools, methods, and disciplines often grouped together and called the Humanities.
It Sticks With You
M.G. Proaps graduated from REL in 2013 and then landed in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He is currently in the application process for graduate school. It’s pretty safe to say President Obama gets most things he does scrutinized and what he buys at Christmas time would be no exception. Indeed, among many an article analyzing whether it was Obama’s worst year ever or just worst year as president, what he bought at a bookstore seems like a rather modest topic to […]
The Challenge of the Humanities
An article in the Wall Street Journal last week decrying the shift in English departments away from the classics reflects the challenge that the Humanities faces because Humanities research often creates discomfort. The article specifically used UCLA’s 2011 curriculum change, which no longer requires semester-long courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer, favoring courses that focus on issues of gender, class, race, etc., as a symbol of a focus in critical theory on everyone being victims. Her characterization of these courses […]
On Skepticism
“Maybe those moments of persistence, guidance, motivation, and continuity are actually the moments where religion itself gets constructed. Maybe it’s shape-shifting because it is constantly being rebuilt. But by who? And to what end? These were the questions driving my skepticism.” Seen Prof. Michael Altman‘s latest blog post on the Religion in American History blog? Read more here… […]
Theory in Practice
Several Facebook friends have recently re-posted this Guardian article, “Why Non-Believers Need Rituals Too.” Its argument is that humanists or atheists or agnostics — or whatever else we name this loosely (if at all) identified group, a group likely comprised by our very talking about it — need to give more attention to the aesthetics of their collective practices. Why? … because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. […]
A New Year’s Coincidence?
Did you know that January 1st is also the beginning of the new year in Japanese Shinto, marked by celebrating the holiday known as Gantan-sai? Calendrical coincidence? Hardly. […]
Do You Eat Them for Dessert?
File this story under “Classification Matters”: is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? I’ve used the Nix v. Hedden 1893 US Supreme Court decision in intro classes for quite some time, to illustrate the point that identity is the product of negotiations within practical conditions. Such as winning the right to count carrot marmalade as “fruit” for the purposes of trade within the European Union, perhaps? (Search for “carrot” in the following PDF document.) Even when it comes to […]
Your Authentic is Illusory, of Course
Listening to a radio story this morning, on a church in Denver that prides itself on being diverse and on the social/political edge — one that, predictably, aims to “create an authentic Christian experience without the pretension that can come with church” — it occurred to me just how deeply reductionist, materialist theories of religion have seeped into daily life. For, despite how dangerous these theories are seen to be by some (when they’re applied to their own lives, that […]
Going, Going, Gone
Did you catch this news story a couple weeks ago? It read: […]
Nones Panel Response and Discussion
Did you miss the panel “Discussing the Nones: What They Say About the Category Religion and American Society” at the American Academy of Religion meetings in Baltimore last month? Our own Prof. Steven Ramey joined Chip Callahan (Missouri), Sean McCloud (UNC Charlotte), Monica Miller (Lehigh University) and Patricia O’Connell Killen (Gonzaga) for a lively panel discussion that is now available for your viewing pleasure. Steven and Monica have already written about their responses to the panel here. Now you can watch it for yourself, with a new segment posted each day this week. […]