The day I meet postmodernists whose relativism does not disappear the minute they start talking about salaries and workloads is the day I will take relativism seriously. That’s a quotation I saw posted on social media yesterday, from Steve Bruce‘s new book Researching Religion: Why We Need Social Science. My comment on the site? I find positions one disagrees with are easiest critiqued when one parodies them. Fending off parodies of postmodernism’s influence in our field is a full-time job […]
Tag: Theology
But Why Is It Interesting?
I’ve seen a variety of posts on social media about the recently-opened Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. While some have been pointing out the legal problems surrounding how the museum has acquired some of its artifacts, others contest how the museum presents its material. In other words, there are those who see it as nothing less than “evangelical propaganda” — and some of those holding this position seem to be scholars of the bible. […]
In Other Words…
Like some of you, I woke today to an email soliciting submissions for a special issue of the open access online journal Open Theology. The email opened as follows: A person who reads texts from other religious traditions sometimes encounters what the reader understands to be a transcendent encounter with ultimacy. Encounters with the ultimate – not only with texts but also with practices and persons – need to be taken into account theologically…. Now, I’m not going to harp […]
Problems in the Big Tent
On social media yesterday a variety of people posted a link to a recent First Things blog post by a theology professor at Nortre Dame who made the argument that religions other than Christianity do not have theologies. For although “[n]on-Christian piety is real and profound,” or so she claims, she defines the term theology in such a way, taking into account it’s so-called pre-modern usage, as to exclude anyone but Christians from having it. She writes: Non-Christian piety is […]
Revolutionary Love?
A colleague at another school sent me the email that recently went out to all program unit chairs for the American Academy of Religion (AAR), our field’s largest professional association. Because the president sets a theme for the upcoming year’s annual meeting, our incoming president has written the following text to explain her choice of theme for 2016 — one that all program units are then invited to focus on, to whatever extent, in their own calls for papers. […]
Theses on a Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion: Part 1
I made a promise during the inaugural seminar on the Global-Critical Philosophy of Religion that met last week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion: to apply Bruce Lincoln’s theses on method to the philosophy of religion. The seminar itself has the objective of producing a new philosophy of religion textbook that”thoroughly integrates non theistic religious philosophies and critically engages the methodological and theoretical issues of religious studies.” Why? As I have written elsewhere, a review of the TOCs of […]
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The Tremendous Irony of it All
Last week there was some chatter online about the nominations put forward for the leadership of our field’s main professional association. (Question: why does the nominating committee exercise a monopoly on determining the organization’s leadership?) Apart from a variety of posts on Facebook and Twitter, the blogs I saw were those by Mike Altman, Aaron Hughes, Finbarr Curtis, and Elesha Coffman. They’re all well worth reading. The issue, for some, seems to be that the VP nominees are both Christian […]
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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The Devil Made Me Do It
I assume that by now you’ve seen either the original video, or the subsequent apology of the principal of TNT Academy in Stone Mountain, Georgia — it concerns an incident at this past Friday’s graduation in which the principal mistakenly ended the ceremony before the valedictorian’s address. In her efforts to call the audience back, to hear his speech, she chastised the people who were standing and leaving, tried to get the venue’s doors closed, called a person a “little […]
Everyone Should Major in Religious Studies (Or At Least Take the Intro Class)
Emily Vork is a sophomore from Ojai, California triple-majoring in History, Religious Studies, and American Studies. Her hobbies include eating and reading Internet comments. After declaring my second major in Religious Studies, I got asked a lot of questions from home. Whenever I’d tell someone about my new major, I’d always—without fail—receive one of two responses: “Oh, Religious Studies? That makes sense. You’re pretty religious,” or, “Religious Studies? That doesn’t make sense—I thought you were religious!” […]
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