Join us for the 2022 Aronov Lecture with Prof. Andrea Jain, hosted by Prof. Steven Ramey. March 23, 2022 at 7pm (Central Time) The Aronov lecture will be virtual again this year as we transition back to normal operations and look forward to next year’s in-person event. Andrea R. Jain, Ph.D. is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture […]
Tag: Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Note from the Field: A Comment
In his comment on the recent JAAR cover, Jack Llewellyn made reference to the caption (pictured above) that appears on the inside table of contents, in the current issue, which describes the photo in question. I admit that I had not paid attention to any of this until I read his comment. And so what then caught my attention in that caption was the manner in which the seemingly descriptive voice can be far from merely descriptive. […]
Components of What?
One of our grad students has pointed out a problem with a recent article that we read in our Department’s monthly journal group; Sarah wrote: Although titled “Durkheim with Data,” it seemed as though the creators of this project have not critically considered or defined the very categories they have opted to work within… I think this is a pretty keen insight, for when I first read the article I was struck by a passage on p. 323, coming after […]
The Limits of the Field
Only recently did it come to my attention that one of the journals in our field now seems to understand itself in a curiously narrow way. […]
A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 10: Peer Review
This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. As with the eighth and ninth points of the draft document, the tenth also strikes me as unproductively redundant: For while the previous two were both concerned with scholars talking plainly to wide audiences, this bullet point focuses on that too, but narrows […]
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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 8: Diverse Approaches
This is an installment in an ongoing series on the American Academy of Religion’s recently released draft statement on research responsibilities. An index of the complete series (updated as each article is posted) can be found here. The seventh bullet point concerns the Academy’s common description of itself as being devoted to religious studies and theology, for it reads as follows: But what exactly are these guiding principles that rule scholarship in or out — in a word, what makes […]
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No Chili Peppers
There’s a bit of a controversy brewing in social media over a new review essay published in the our field’s main peer review periodical, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, on the book, On Teaching Religion, edited by Chris Lehrich and containing some of the writings on pedagogy by Jonathan Z. Smith. The reviewer, a onetime student of Smith’s, reflects on her own experience in his classes, as an undergrad at the University of Chicago in the late-1990s, in […]
“And That’s Why No One Takes The Humanities Seriously”
In the second of its four issues in 2011, the widest circulating journal in the academic study of religion–the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR)–began opening each issue with a poem. […]
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