I’m on a panel, at a national conference this November, assessing the contributions of the late Huston Smith, so I’m re-reading some things that I’ve not read in a long time — such as his 1958 book, The Religions of Man (which, in one or another edition, has been in print ever since it was first published).
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. Continue reading
The other day I came across this video, from a publisher advertising a recent textbook on world religions. Continue reading
Readers in the US may have already seen the commercials for Reza Aslan‘s upcoming series, Believer.
It starts Sunday March 5 on CNN at 10 pm (eastern time). Continue reading
I saw on social media yesterday that Huston Smith is reported to have passed away. He was 97. Apart from an update on Wikipedia there’s not much news on this on social media yet. Continue reading
The tenth installment in our A Good Book series is now on vimeo! This episode revisits Prof. Michael Altman as he shares yet another influential book, The Invention of World Religions by Tomoko Masuzawa. Be sure to give it a watch!
Another Good Book with Prof. Altman from UA Religious Studies.
I found this over at the Huffington Post this morning — an announcement for a new HarvardX (part of edX) course on religious literacy.
The course is described as follows: Continue reading
I’m writing this post during the office hours of my first REL100 course, “Introduction to the Study of Religion.” During the term, my 150 students were introduced to something they clearly did not expect: the study of religion. What did they expect? Something about this… Continue reading
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 previous post ended by citing the fourth of Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses on Method” — specifically, his call for scholars always to contextual, historicize, what they study by asking “who speaks here?” and “to what audience?” Among my difficulties with the AAR’s draft document is that it reads as if its authors had never read or taken seriously comments on the field such as Lincoln’s. Again, while I have no idea what debates took place between the members — or better yet, what compromises were required — reading their draft’s second bullet point’s advice that we “promote good” by, among other things, “telling the truth” flies in the face of Lincoln’s own widely read thoughts on what we ought to be doing in this field when we do research. Continue reading
Are you looking for a way to think through what it takes for a local idea to spread worldwide and be adopted globally — an idea such as the now taken-for-granted assumption that the world has such things in it as religions, which exist in a variety of (as Wilfred Cantwell Smith once phrased it) major or minor forms that, mostly, end in the suffix -ism?
Well, look no further than the marketing campaign for W. W. Norton’s new anthology of world religions readings. I can only imagine how much money is up for grabs in the textbook/anthology market to prompt them to invest the sort of budget they must have in promoting it. (I also can’t imagine the permissions budget they established to acquire the rights to all of the reprints it includes.) Continue reading
