It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases.

Hardwired into religious traditions, as part of longstanding sensibilities, are teachings about justice, care for the weak, and attention to the common good: teachings that command nontrivial respect in the public sphere.... Common sense plus the moral legacies of our religious traditions add up to a combined weight that is not trivial. We may not be able to fight a riptide, but if we can fund a war, then surely we can fund a school.

[Last October, I posted a rush article entitled "Fragments Related to Christian Nationalism" (CN). It included a promise to revise and...

Although A Complete Unknown is not a great film, without limitations worth noting, it is more than solid. Its high points are outstanding, and it is excellent for sparking thought about major issues. You should definitely watch A Complete Unknown if you haven’t thought about Bob Dylan lately and/or you care about how music relates to cultural critique. However, I will suggest that the film should be more a starting point for reflection than an end point. 

What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health...

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories...

For the New Year, let’s recall two milestones on the Christian Right from the past year. One of the key architects of that movement, Pat...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...

If you followed me on the wordpress site where I started blogging in 2017, perhaps you've clicked over to this site by now. Or perhaps...

I wrote this history of transformations in the academic study of religion at the University of Tennessee: both macro changes in the...

In the first and second sections of this three-part post—introduced here and expanded from an article in the Encyclopedia of American...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five.  Here is...

I've built up several cheesy but memorable “mottos” for the academic study of religion, to use in teaching. The focus today is “this...

NOTE: I am publishing tomorrow, in October 2024, a note to link back to this article which has continuing relevance even though it first...

…Or… if you want to watch, or already did—if you are into that sort of thing—let’s compare notes. The production was fascinating in...

There isn’t much point in sending readers of this little blog to Reading Religion , the American Academy of Religion’s review portal—I...

In few days I head to my summer writing place, a log cabin in the Wisconsin north woods where my mom grew up. It's about halfway between...

In both classes I am teaching this term, I heard matter-of-fact comments about how end-times theologies correlate with “fatalism”—which...

My previous post explained why “refereed” publications—those vetted by expert academic gatekeepers—do not reliably signal scholarly...

I should not be writing this! I absolutely have better things to do by almost any measure. Yet I have been asked to clarify which of my...