Though the ultra-Orthodox case is, of course, particular, it calls attention to how digital media may affect religious communities during…
Digital media, religious authority, and the Covid-19 pandemic
media
Channeling populism
The first step toward a rigorous analysis of media and populism is to provincialize the influence of charismatic leaders like…
Creating new Sufi publics at an old Sufi shrine
[M]odern Sufis have recognized the importance of music and the arts as a recruitment tool for forming a new Sufi…
Le mal des fleurs
Surely one reason for the ongoing but mistakenly benign and otherworldly cliché of India as a land of “spirituality” is…
The glowing aura of an impossible elsewhere
In this moment of unbearable precariousness, what does it mean to turn one’s face away from the only this of…
Who do you want me to be?
A couple years ago, while watching television and rocking a restless infant to sleep, an advertisement for the website ancestry.com…
Believer, religious studies, and the public
In this short forum, we have asked a handful of scholars to discuss the relationship between scholarship, public knowledge, and…
Apologia pro Reza: Why I like Believer
I am a comparative historian of early Christianity who reads widely in and engages in academic forums around new religious…
Understanding the president’s reality: Our unconscious, not his
The matter of the love-hate relationship between psychoanalysis and public life has an unexpected link to the complexities of secularism…
Scholar or retailer of import goods? Reza Aslan, his guru, and his critics
![By Ken Wieland [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://ssrc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/12155304/Ahilya_Ghat_by_the_Ganges_Varanasi-e1494618784878.jpg)
“I came to Varanasi India to do a show about Hinduism, about karma, reincarnation, the caste system, and a little…