What were old women presumed to know about medicine, and why was it always old women? Alongside the trope of…
Do old women know medicine?
history
The ethic of discipleship in East Harlem
In 1948, three Union seminarians hatched the idea for one such program: an experimental urban ministry, dubbed the East Harlem…
Is Baathism an Arabic word?
I started to reflect on why it should be that such an extremely limited range of Arabic-language terms appear to…
The longue durée of apocalypse
Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne discuss apocalypse as both beginning and ending in the context of the rise of settler…
Experience between the secular and the divine
The strange and often contradictory ways that phenomenology has been woven into and through diverse religious traditions are the subject…
Carrying risk in antiquity and the present
I have been struck by similarities with how Romans managed uncertainty. Using some material from my current project, this essay…
Is Europe Christian?—A reply
I thank the contributors for expanding the conversation with enriching perspectives. Of course, my book has its own limitations in…
Placing the pandemic in time: Astrology and Covid-19
Many Americans have turned to astrology, the study of correlations between celestial patterns and temporal events, to make sense of…
Questions of power and privilege in Europe’s relationship with Christianity
It is not whether Europe is Christian or not that matters. What matters is who is asking the question and…
Protection without punishment: Turning to Buddhist gods during Covid-19
I am curious about how people turned to the gods historically, the discursive modes permissible for doing so in 2020,…