Classification – Page 5 – Studying Religion in Culture

Words and Things: Happily Ever After Religion

February 20, 2017 by admin

Richard Newton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Elizabethtown College. His scholarship focuses on the anthropology of scriptures. He also curates the student-scholar collaborative blog, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture, and Teaching. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @seedpods. (The introduction to the series is posted here.) Brent Nongbri begins his approach to religious studies with memory of a problem. The problem is his inability to translate the English word, “religion” into the Khasi language of his fatherland. […]

Words and Things: One or Two Things That I Know About Religion

February 15, 2017 by admin

Anders Klostergaard Petersen is a Professor in the School of Culture and Society in the Department for the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. He works in the areas of second Temple Judaism and early Christianity as well as studying cultural evolution. This post leads off a series of invited posts on the topic of words and things in the study of religion (introduced here). During the last three years two important books have been published highlighting the absence […]

Jim and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

December 28, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

In the close to Fabricating Origins — a recent collection of short essays, by a wide array of scholars, on the problem of origins — I used the example of Jim and Pam, from the U.S. adaptation of the British series, “The Office,” to illustrate how malleable, and thus useful, the archive of the past can be in our efforts to make sense of where we happen to find ourselves today. For all I know I’ve blogged about it before […]

Make It So

December 20, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

Did you catch Titus Hjelm‘s excellent post the other day? His argument concerned the manner in which otherwise routine claims or actions are represented by specific groups, for specific reasons, as controversial; the apparent controversy of some religions (notably, in his post, Islam — at least to a number of people in so-called Western countries) is thus not an essential trait but one that is acquired in the public marketplace. […]

It May Be Simpler Than You Think

December 10, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

I saw the above tweet yesterday, which prompted me to mull over why we generally think that the role of religion is such a complicated thing to study. It occurred to me that it is complicated (i) if you fail to recognize that there’s been trained scholars of religion out there for well over 100 years who have lots to say on these matters but also (ii) if we buy local accounts of it being some ethereal thing that mysteriously […]

Legitimacy of Classification at Standing Rock

November 28, 2016 by admin

Anastasiya Titarenko is a junior majoring in Religious Studies. She has spent the fall semester interning for a non-profit in Wellington, New Zealand. Classification matters. In North Dakota, it arguably permits the violation of one’s First Amendment rights. The First Amendment states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to […]

It’s Fall, Y’all!

October 26, 2016 by Andie Alexander

By Andie Alexander Andie Alexander earned her B.A. in Religious Studies and History in 2012. She is now working on her MA in Religious Studies at CU Boulder. Andie also works as the online Curator for the Culture on the Edge blog. It’s that time of year again: the leaves are turning colors, the air is cooling down (in some places, at least), and pumpkin flavored/scented products are taking over. Growing up in Alabama, I always enjoyed (well, maybe not […]

“What happens after the deconstruction?”

September 23, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

I recently listened to The Religious Studies Project’s latest interview, with Teemu Taira, on the category religion. The way the interview was framed, by Breann Fallon, was “where do we go from here” (as Taira phrases it) — i.e., having understood that the field’s primary organizing concept can itself be examined as an historical artifact, how do we now carry out our work? […]

The Devil’s in the Details

September 16, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

My early book was cited near the start of Chris Kavanagh‘s recent online essay, as an example of a work in the study of religion that — despite him agreeing that there is “much that is valid in such critiques” — seems to constitute “academic minutiae” that we should put behind us, so we can just get on with our work. If you’ve not read the piece, you should. Here’s the closing two paragraphs. I’d like to focus on what […]

Cant Live With It, Can’t Live Without It

September 14, 2016 by Russell McCutcheon

The other day on Facebook, over at the Religious Studies Project‘s page, two posts went up, within a few hours of each other, that made for an interesting (if unintended) juxtaposition. The first is pictured above (click it to read the article), and the second is pictured below. […]

Studying Religion in Culture

Ongoing Discussions at the University of Alabama

Tag: Classification