Religion and Media Religious Studies

Slow Journalism? Ethnography as a Means of Understanding Religious Social Activism, Part 2 (James V. Spickard)

The following is a talk presented at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, and is the second installment of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. II. Epistemological Musings So much for “the deductions from the obvious” that I promised to explore with you. I also promised you some “epistemological […]

Religion and Media Religious Studies

Slow Journalism? Ethnography As A Means Of Understanding Religious Social Activism, Part 1 (James V. Spickard)

The following is a talk presented at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, and is the first installment of a two-part series. When I was invited to give this talk, my first reaction was “why me”? As a rather obscure and not very orthodox sociologist of religion from a second-tier West Coast teaching […]

Reviews

Review – The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Rebekah Gordon)

Fitzgerald, Francis. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. New York City, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. ISBN-10: 1439131333. Hardcover. 637 pages. In her book The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Francis Fitzgerald provides a comprehensive history of white evangelical movements in America for the express purpose of […]

Religious Studies Theology

Religious Studies and Comparative Theology – An Appraisal (Joshua Samuel)

The title “religious scholar,” it must be remembered, is a very ambiguous categorization. It could either mean those who are engaged in academic work in the religious department of a university or it could also include those involved in subjective religious study, like in a seminary. From a critical post-modern perspective, it could also include […]

Political Theory

Framing Religious Conflict and Violence – Insights from Historical Institutionalism, Part 2 (Vivek Swaroop Sharma)

The following is the second installment of a two-part series.  The first installment can be found here. Religious Conflict and Violence Reframed There are two important qualifications to the following discussion that are required.  First, this discussion is not about religious violence per se.  Religious violence, as we have seen above, can be a normal […]

Political Theory

Framing Religious Conflict and Violence – Insights from Historical Institutionalism, Part 1 (Vivek Swaroop Sharma)

The following is the first installment of a two-part series. Killing hundreds of people in the name of “cow protection” would, at first glance, appear to be a headline drawn from a Monty Python skit.  Instead, it is a political problem of the first order in India.  Since the 2014 election of Narendra Modi and […]

Religion and Literature

Traversing W.H. Auden’s Religious And Aesthetic States, Part 3 (Raji Singh Soni)

The following is the final installment of a three-part series.  The first one can be found here, the second one here. As Julia Reinhard Lupton argues, Shakespeare’s Caliban complicates our sense of what it means to be a creature or creaturely. “The world of creatures,” Lupton posits,[1] constitutes an infinity rather than a totality, since it is […]

Religion and Literature

Traversing W.H. Auden’s Religious And Aesthetic States, Part 2 (Raji Singh Soni)

The following is the second installment of a three-part series.  The first one can be found here. Used by Auden in concert with “limitation” to qualify boundaries proper to secular aesthetics in modernity, the term “absurd” in its Kierkegaardian sense implies another precinct against which art and the artist will necessarily chafe in nonreligious domains […]

Religion and Literature

Traversing W.H. Auden’s Religious And Aesthetic States, Part 1 (Raji Singh Soni)

The following is part one of an article that will be published in three successive installments. TRINCULO   Servant-monster! The folly of this island! They say there’s but five upon this isle: we are three of them; if th’other two be brained like us, the state totters.[1] In the expanse of scholarship on W.H. Auden’s oeuvre, […]

Political Theology Political Theory

The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory, And The Tawdry – Media And The Undoing Of The Demos, Part 3 (Carl Raschke)

This article is the last of three installments. It was originally a paper given at the international conference “The Crisis of Representation” at Melk Conference Center (Stift Melk, Austria) sponsored by the Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society Platform at the University of Vienna (June 27, 2017). The first installment can be found here, the second one here. It is […]