By GAO, Zhe “In the name of science Vs in the name of religion” — The Chinese team wore masks while the Iran team wore hijabs in the first set of their Asian Cup encounter on Aug. 25, 2022 ©GETTY IMAGES One of the lessons intellectuals should have learnt since the pandemic, I believe, is how quickly both the virus and our knowledge about it and the pandemic could change, diachronically and geographically, to the extent that you may easily feel embarrassed to read some of the viewpoints you published merely two months ago towards a certain part of the world. This applies more to humanities inte ..read more

The gendered dimension of the ‘good religion’/‘bad religion’ narrative and its racial implications By Rabea Khan What does the modern category ‘religion’ have to do with Judith Butler’s theory on gender performativity? Quite a bit, if you consider how religion in Western modernity is a feminised category. In my recently published article with Critical Research on Religion, I show how a feminine gender identity is inscribed into the modern (and as I prefer to call it modern-colonial) category ‘religion’. What illustrates this feminisation of religion especially well is the popular ‘good religio ..read more

By Zenko Takayama[1] Phenomena that religious scholars of the past could unreservedly describe as “magical” are still occurring all the time, even now. For example, under the influence of COVID-19, some people destroyed the 5G antennas by believing that this would curb its infection. They have also begun to sell amulets or stones that supposedly prevent COVID-19. These would have been pointed out in the past as being based on “magical thinking” without a doubt. But the problem with the conceptualization of magic must be dealt with first before we consider “magical thinking”. The main focus of ..read more

By Ting Guo* “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love”—indeed, as Che Guevara most famously put it, love is a powerful language for not only revolutions, but also politics. Love has been a powerful mechanism in shaping Chinese modernity. Rather than studying love in the private realm such as romance, relationship, and family, in my forthcoming book Politics of Love, I study love as a public and political discourse, and examine how the concept of love has been introduced, adapted and engineered for the building and rebuilding of a modern nation by looking ..read more

By Brian Nail As many Americans grow increasingly optimistic about the possibility that Trump will soon be voted out of office, it is worth considering the more widespread set of political and religious forces which produced this viral president in the first place. Trump’s time in office has revealed longstanding structures of racial oppression that are unlikely to simply disappear in the event that he loses the upcoming election. Although many advocates of so-called “political civility” have regarded him as a monstrous anomaly,Trump’s ascendancy has a genealogy, or perhaps epidemiology, that ..read more

By Isabella Schwaderer An approximately two-hour walk from Weimar’s railway station takes you to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Thousands of victims of the Nazi regime had to walk this way. On 16 April 1945, shortly after the liberation of the concentration camp, around 1,000 Weimar citizens also walked this way – at the order of the American Supreme Command. They were to see the horror of Buchenwald with their own eyes.  To commemorate these events, media artist Christoph Korn composed an audio walk for the project “Gang nach Buchenwald” (“Walk to Buchenwald”) of the Kunstfest W ..read more

You can download it from here: https://books2read.com/u/49MGg8 ..read more

Russell T. McCutcheon University of Alabama Anyone familiar with our Department at the University of Alabama may know that we have a pretty active social media presence, among which is a Facebook group devoted to our current students and graduates of our program. Apart from putting a variety of Department announcements there, such as recent posts from our blog (on everything from student writing to updates on how we’re handling the Fall 2020 semester), I occasionally put a news item there, with #inthenews as the tag, to suggest to our students that there’s considerable application of the skill ..read more

by Alison Jasper A protestor wears a mask honoring Breonna Taylor in downtown Louisville, Kentucky on 1 June 2020. Photograph: Amy Harris/Rex/Shutterstock One of Deleuze and Guattari’s most fascinating concepts is that of the war machine (A Thousand Plateaus, 1988) or more broadly, the notion of a machine. It suggests endlessly complex and variable interrelationships between institutions, social groups, bodies, objects, movements, ideas and environments, moving and producing change in accordance with shifting and differentially weighted purposes and moods. In a machine, components are brought ..read more

By Malory Nye What does a Critical Religion approach have to do with race, and in particular in what ways should Critical Religion make central an engagement with Critical Race theory? Tim Fitzgerald (e.g., 2008, 2012, 2015) – and others on this blog – have very clearly set out the agenda for a Critical Religion approach, much of which I strongly agree with. Thus, my own starting point for the study of religion is that this entity that gets called ‘religion’ (a thing that is not-a-thing) is bound up closely with another ideological entity that is called modernity (Asad 2003; Fitzgerald 2 ..read more