The portraits social scientists create get appropriated by their subjects, used, and fed back to social scientists. Like a Cherokee…
Institutions, discourses, practices… and life-in-the-world
spirituality
Grasping for authenticity
The New Metaphysicals offers a peek into a world that I found at once pedestrian and strange, and the information…
The dangers of spirituality?
CNN profiles the growing "spiritual but not religious" population, contrasting the views of some who fear that the spiritual turn…
Redeeming the Burning Man
In her newly published book Theater in a Crowded Fire, Lee Gilmore tells the story of the infamous Burning Man Festival,…
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…
The artist and presence
Much ink, real and digital, has been spent on the closing of the Marina Abramović retrospective The Artist is Present.…
Spirituality, entangled: An interview with Courtney Bender
Courtney Bender is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-chair of the SSRC’s Working Group on Spirituality,…
Serving the master
Religion Dispatches reviews Lake Lambert's Spirituality, Inc.: Religion in the American Workplace (NYU Press, 2009).
Was early America a Christian America?
The furious debate in some quarters over whether America was born a “Christian nation” is ironic. The historical record shows…