by Tenzan Eaghll On the evening of November 9, 2016, as Trump’s victory over Clinton seemed inevitable, CNN commentator Van Jones made a statement that would prove true not only about the results at the polls, but the many things to come in the realm of politics, philosophy, and even theory in the academic study of religion. Almost holding back tears, Van Jones said, “this was a white-lash, this was a white-lash against a changing  country, it was a white-lash against a black president….” Since election night almost two years ago, the data has most certainly shown Van Jones to be correct abou ..read more

by Tony Burke This post originally appeared on the author’s blog. As I work through the contributions to the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, I am struck by how many of them are related to a genre of literature that has not been discussed much in connection with apocryphal texts. This genre is erotapokriseis (question-and-answer) texts. For an introduction to this literature, see Péter Tóth, “New Wine in Old Wineskin: Byzantine Reuses of the Apocryphal Revelation Dialogue,” in Dialogues and Debates from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium(ed. Averil Cameron ..read more

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST Proposed New Network: Discourses of Religion and the Non-Religious/Secular in Islamic Contexts Please send expressions of interest to Dr Alex Henley (alex.henley@theology.ox.ac.uk). A critical school has emerged in the Study of Religion that identifies the category of ‘religion’ as a modern concept inseparable from its post-Enlightenment twin, ‘the secular’ (Asad 1993; Fitzgerald 2000). Pioneering work has been done on the invention of ‘religion’ in various colonial contexts (Chidester 1996; King 1999; Masuzawa 2005; Josephson 2012; Horii 2018), but few sustai ..read more

Editor’s note: Bulletin Book Reviews is the newly developed book review portal for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, associated with NAASR and published by Equinox. We are interested in reviewing titles of wide relevance to the academic study of religion, particularly those which themselves foreground issues of method and theory in the study of religion or from which such issues can be gleaned and discussed productively. We encourage submissions from doctoral students and established faculty alike. For more information, please visit the page linked above Credulity: A Cultural History of ..read more

by Joseph P. Laycock and Natasha L. Mikles Anyone who has led discussion in an introductory undergraduate Religious Studies class has experienced frustrating comments from students such as, “Jews practice empty ritual,” or “Buddhists are more spiritual than other religions.” It seems that regardless of efforts to set up “ground rules” at the beginning of the course, comments likes these still show up. The worst is when they appear in final exam essays and one wonders if all of their instruction has fallen on deaf ears. In fairness to our students, doing analysis within a religious studies cla ..read more

In this series with the Bulletin, we ask scholars to talk about how they describe what they do to outsiders by sharing a story or two, and reflect on how this has affected their identity as scholars of religion. For other posts in this series, follow the link.  by Merinda Simmons Sometimes part of the work in articulating what it is one does intellectually or professionally is figuring out decisively what it is one does not do. As part of last year’s NAASR program on “Theory in a Time of Excess,” I talked about the perils of defining an approach exclusively as a negative (i.e., the critical t ..read more

In this series with the Bulletin, we ask scholars to talk about how they describe what they do to outsiders by sharing a story or two, and reflect on how this has affected their identity as scholars of religion. For other posts in this series, follow the link. by James Crossley Do you want to hear my anecdote about my favourite experience along the lines (though admittedly not the same as), “So you’re not a priest?” Of course you do. I was reading a book on the development of the study of Christian origins in the nineteenth and twentieth century (Ward Blanton’s Displacing Christian Origins) i ..read more

The Northwestern Department of Religious Studies graduate students invite young scholars to submit paper proposals for “Sovereignty & Strangeness,” a graduate conference to be held October 19-21, 2018 in Evanston, IL. Proposals are due May 6, 2018. You can get more details and view the full CFP at our website: https://sites.northwestern.edu/sovereigntyandstrangeness.   This conference aims to explore the constitutive relationship between sovereignty and that which is strange, queer, or illegible. How might the language of sovereignty be useful for thinking about power in religious or se ..read more

In this series with the Bulletin, we ask scholars to talk about how they describe what they do to outsiders by sharing a story or two, and reflect on how this has affected their identity as scholars of religion. For other posts in this series, follow the link.  “What will he become?” by Sher Afgan Tareen On most afternoons in West Windsor New Jersey where my aunt resides, apart from grabbing a pear from the kitchen table or scanning all the family pictures in the sunroom for one more time, there usually is not all that much to do. A decade ago, the usual placidity turned tense when my grandmo ..read more

In this series with the Bulletin, we ask scholars to talk about how they describe what they do to outsiders by sharing a story or two, and reflect on how this has affected their identity as scholars of religion. For other posts in this series, follow the link.  Explaining Yourself To Others –Religious Studies and Jewish Studies by Zachary Braiterman Maybe it’s not a bad thing, but why is it the case that a Jewish Studies professor or a professor of Religion has to constantly explain to others what he or she does? Because of the roles, obscure and not so obscure, that religion plays in the pub ..read more