When I set out to examine the lifestyle changes of employees working night shifts in India’s call centers, I was…
capitalism
The house that D’Souza built?
Earlier this year, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, a former adjunct professor at King's College, wrote an exposé for Killing the Buddha…
The geopolitical imperative?
Ritualistic evocations of "America" . . . and the deep-seated sense that somehow the United States is sacrosanct space—war, by…
Every moment an Aha! Moment!
Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover…
Oprah the Omnipotent
Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation.…
OMG: Oprah Winfrey, pop religion, and the temple of our familiar
I have been—and perhaps in some ways will always be—one of the denizens, the followers, the 100% skeptical and yet…
Oprah, the Rorschach test
Focusing on Oprah as an icon/inkblot, we can use our reactions to her as a Rorschach test: What do we…
Spirituality: what remains?
To use the concept of spirituality analytically is enormously difficult. There comes a point in reading this book when one…
“The hegemony of her sway”
Oprah’s “gift is not her interviewing strategy but her confessional promiscuity.” While claiming only to tell you what she herself…
Post-secular development
For most of the second half of the twentieth century development was assumed to be consonant with modernity and its…