When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied,…
Where did religion come from?
academia
RFP: New Directions in the Study of Prayer
The Social Science Research Council recently announced the launch of a new project and grants program entitled "New Directions in…
New directions in the study of prayer
The Social Science Research Council has just announced the launch of a major new project and grants program entitled “New…
A suspension of (dis)belief
Most academic discussions in political science and international relations presuppose a fixed definition of the secular and the religious and…
The Help, ethnography, and ickiness
This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins…
Normative demands of Islamic studies scholarship
As a lawyer, I appreciate the critical importance of historical inquiry to contemporary legal challenges; as a historian, I resist…
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…
New journal: Secularism and Nonreligion
Secularism and Nonreligion, the "world's first journal dedicated to the study of the nonreligious and the secular," recently announced its…
The politics of inaccuracy and a case for “Islamic law”
Since the process of understanding divine law is not a uniform or singular one, there are multiple interpretations of what…