After attending a February 10th discussion with multimedia artist Laurie Anderson at Columbia University, Columbia Religion Professor Courtney Bender wrote…
Figuring American Spirituality
Courtney Bender
Should one pray for an atheist?
The health of Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist and critic of religion, has become a major news story. Hitchens is…
Holding on to multiplicity
Scholars of religion (like, it seems, scholars of nearly everything animate and inanimate) have yet to decide if the world…
Power spots
“Shoveling fog” is Courtney Bender’s acute phrase for the work of “studying spirituality,” an amorphous term that has suffered much…
Working on individualism
Even the most open-minded social scientists—those who are up for studying almost any social group or activity—tend to find the…
Institutions, discourses, practices… and life-in-the-world
The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee…
Grasping for authenticity
The New Metaphysicals offers a peek into a world that I found at once pedestrian and strange, and the information…
Quantum sociology and The New Metaphysicals
At first glance, Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals might appear narrow and idiosyncratic. After all, it's an ethnography of spiritual practitioners in…
The Catholic heresy, again
The reason I am talking about Catholics here is because of the subtitle of Bender's book: Spirituality and the American…