Tag: Research Responsibility


Research Responsibilities Revisited

Some may recall a series of posts from the summer of 2015, on what I saw as the shortcomings of a draft statement of the American Academy of Religion on their members’ research responsibilities. Their draft document was then the basis for a session at the AAR’s 2015 annual meeting, in Atlanta that year, and a final version of the document was then produced and passed, early in 2016, by the AAR Board. Until recently I wasn’t aware of where […]

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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 12: Highest Standards

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 thirteenth and final item included in the draft document reads as follows: At this point in the series there’s not really all that much left to say. For in my reading, there’s too little  specificity to the document’s claims to assist us […]

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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 11: Research Assistants

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 second to the last item on the draft document is the only one that concerns our work with students — odd, if you think about it, since much of teaching concerns preparing them to be researchers themselves, so you’d think that a […]

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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 9: Broader Public

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. Much like the earlier post on doing human subjects research, we find a truism enshrined in the draft document’s eighth bullet point (at least in the opening clause; I include the ninth also since it too is related): I’m not sure if there […]

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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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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 7: Methodological Pluralism

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. Hanabusa Itchō‘s (d. 1724) print of the well-known parable of the blindmen and the elephant seemed to me a fitting image to open this commentary on the sixth bullet point in this document. It reads: I won’t quibble as to why the word […]

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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 6: Irrevocable Commitments

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. This is, at least to me, perhaps the most troubling of all the bullet points in the document, because of the way it fails to take a stand despite providing the impression of taking a very strong one. As with other portions of […]

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A Response to “Responsible Research Practices,” Part 5: Sources and Interpretations

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. What should be clear from my previous comments is that I don’t think the draft document simply needs some editing or a few words added to it, in order to make it work. Instead, I think the entire exercise needs to be rethought, […]

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