Dominant accounts of the religion-modernity relationship, at least among sociologists of religion in the US, have tended to focus mainly…
Notes from the field
In the summer of 2010, a small group of graduate students who received the SSRC Dissertation Development Research Fellowship (DPDF) blogged regularly for The Immanent Frame. The fellows came together in conjunction with a 2010 DPDF subfield called “After Secularization: New Approaches to Religion and Modernity.”
After the fellowship period ended, a select group of fellows continued the blog through the fall of 2010. In their short contributions to “Notes from the field,” the fellows shared notes and reflections on their emerging research, as well as other insights and questions, ruminations, and observations.
Then, in early June 2011, the SSRC program on religion and the public sphere convened twelve advanced graduate students and five distinguished professors for a five-day dissertation workshop on religion and international affairs. Over the course of the workshop, students shared their ongoing work, considered critiques from student and faculty participants, and debated the coherence of the very banner under which they had been gathered.
All of these reflections and notes from these students are gathered below.
Transmitting “secular” oral traditions
Why does our academic culture operate under the assumption that “secular” education is fundamentally distinct from or superior to non-“secular”…
Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization
I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a…
Avitabile’s handwriting
Pietro della Valle. Pietro della Valle was a highly sociable geek with an interest in all things Middle Eastern, c.…
Elsewhere, in the saturation of the body
About eight months into my fieldwork, I began to have dreams about the morning disciplinary routines at OISCA’s training centers.…
Critiquing reductionism
There are reductive categories . . . that have been and should be abandoned in scholarly discourse because the terms…
Prayer is technology. I think.
My dissertation is a comparison of the use of prayer, scripture, science education, and “high technology” in four religious high…
Utopia now
Only when utopia is understood in the present continuous, as arriving without completion, can we make sense of the work…
Religion as culture in “spiritual cultivation”
Despite its roots in a religious entity, OISCA [The Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement] is registered as a…
On reductionism
There’s something attractive about a neat typology, and also something we seem to loathe about the compartmentalization entailed. So what…