What do you think the role of scholars ought to be? […]
Tag: History
Putting the “Religion” in “American Religion”
Craig Prentiss is a professor of religious studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of, Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014). On Thursday, June 4, I took a flight from Kansas City, Missouri to Indianapolis to attend the Fourth Biennial Conference on Religion American Culture hosted by the the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IUPUI. Though it was the […]
Read More from Putting the “Religion” in “American Religion”
How Not to Be a Senior Scholar
I remember almost two years ago when American historian Edmund Morgan died. I had read Morgan’s Visible Saints as part of my doctoral exams but, not being a historian by training or researching the colonial period, I hadn’t read much else of his work. But after his death I read a lot about Morgan. I read stories from his graduate students, from his colleagues, and from scholars who had come into contact with the man one way or another. It seemed […]
Making Cents of Origins
Thanks to the wireless internet on campus and an enterprising student in class with a laptop, a quick e.g. turned into an even better example this semester. […]
Meet the Press
Our own Dr. Merinda Simmons recently published a book, titled Changing the Subject: Writing Women Across the African Diaspora. In this post, she sat down for an interview to discuss the book, her work, and its relations to the academic study of religion. […]
“How Old is That?”
Among the assorted knick-knacks that line my office’s shelves—ranging from such relics as photos of friends and family or gifts I’ve accumulated over the years to a selection of tattered romance novels shelved long ago among my books by mischievous students—is a nicely matted and framed “fossil” of Knightia, a long extinct genus of small boney North American freshwater fish, dating to more than 35 million years ago (or what scientists know as the Eocene epoch), and which was recovered […]
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 […]
I Cannot Tell a Lie
By John D. James John D. James is a junior Religious Studies major and General Business minor from Huntsville, Alabama. In an online article titled “The George Washington You Never Knew”, the author constructs a different, more personal Washington. The author’s own construction of who his “Washington” is includes a poor speaker, a dictator, even a master of espionage. The author is trying to emphasize a view of his “Washington” that few ever see. Challenging the idea of who George […]
Getting Our Hands on an Ungraspable Totality
Have you read Craig Martin‘s new interview with Talal Asad, just published in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion? […]
For Example…
What’s the relevance of the study of religion? Well, religious studies students know how to study things like myths and origins tales, right? And all of us tell origins tales, no? From Uncle so-and-so spinning an annual yarn at some family holiday to scholars trying to find the origins of civilization, we’re all doing it. So that suggests that we’re particularly well-equipped to say a fair bit about how these tales work and why we all tell them. For example, […]