That the “religion of old women” is often cited positively in discussions of disembodied faith, while marginalized in analyses of…
Belief and (mal)practice: Dueling images of old women’s religiosity
ritual
The everyday ecology of antiblack religion
I have been confounded by the similarities between how white Christian reformers understood blackness and how those same assumptions are…
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,…
Climate strikes as rites of mourning the future
Climate strikes are rites of mourning the future, lamenting current catastrophes, and demanding world leaders to radically reduce carbon emissions.…
Piety, publicity, and the paradox of Islamization
The paradox of Islamization . . . has been that in expanding the scope of Islamic authority and making it…
Another Law’s Religion
I cannot help but see a pun in the title of Benjamin Berger's book, Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the…
Curses, foiled again and again
In June 2009, I was interviewing a Fijian Methodist minister on the island of Matuku when the subject of curses…
Overlapping senses of salvation
With a Guatemala’s history of social and political instability, the place of religion in public life is often fraught with…
Jürgen Habermas on myth and ritual
This video is an excerpt of a lecture by Jürgen Habermas, delievered at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and…
Where did religion come from?
When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied,…