Since the process of understanding divine law is not a uniform or singular one, there are multiple interpretations of what…
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.
Of saints, separatism, and secularization (part 2)
In my previous post, I discussed the ambivalent legacy of the Catholic Church in Québec in light of the recent…
Rubber soul
To much fanfare, the Vatican recently decreed that under certain conditions the trapping of male semen by a thin balloon of…
Of saints, separatism, and secularization (part 1)
Three weeks ago, in a province with the lowest rate of Church attendance in Canada, 50,000 people attended Mass to…
Looking for God in the 2010 midterms
The 2010 elections changed a lot about the makeup of Congress, but did they change much about American secularism? A…
Terry Eagleton, New Atheism, and the War on Terror
Last Wednesday evening, eminent theorist of literature and culture Terry Eagleton gave a talk at Columbia University entitled "The New…
Mapping religious landscapes
This summer in Kenya I was able to observe one such community health asset mapping project in the informal settlement…
Indifference we can believe in
Why is it so difficult to treat religion as just another cultural phenomenon?
Don’t drink everything that runs downstream
Concerning recent (and seemingly conflicting) poll results from the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, Justin Reynolds is, I think,…
The wisdom of crowds
The majority of Americans may not know much about their own religions, but they seem to have a pretty good…