Jenny Butler
Dr Jenny Butler holds a Lectureship in the Department of Study of Religions at University College Cork where she teaches on contemporary religions in Ireland, Western Esotericism and new religious movements. She was formerly a Lecturer with the Department of Folklore and Ethnology (2002-2013). She is a member of UCC‟s Marginalized and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre […]
Laurence Cox
Dr Laurence Cox is at the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University. He is interested in social movements and in particular, the sub-field of Buddhist studies. He is a co-founder of the practitioner-oriented journal Interface and co-chair the Council for European Studies’ social movements research network. His main field of research is in Buddhist Studies, […]
2015 Conference on Religion and American Culture Report
The Biennial “Conference on Religion and American Culture” was held June 4 to June 7, 2015 in Indianapolis. The conference is sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Religion & American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. Conference report for The Religious Studies Project by Jeffrey Wheatley, a PhD student at Northwestern University.
Ian Reader
Ian Reader is currently a professor of Japanese and Religious Studies at Lancaster. He has recently published a book titled ‘Pilgrimage in the Marketplace‘ (Routledge) which draws on research in Japan and other places over several years and looks at commercial dynamics and pilgrimage, and his latest book, A Very Short Introduction to Pilgrimage (OUP) […]
Conference Report: International Society for Media, Religion and Culture Conference, 2014
For four days at the beginning of August, I attended the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture (ISMRC) conference within the beautiful grounds of Canterbury Cathedral in England. Hosted by Professor Gordon Lynch of the University of Kent, this conference brought together scholars of media, religion, and culture (sometimes even all three) to analyse these intersections in daily life, in spiritual practice,
The Logics of Bricolage Reconsidered: A Cognitive Approach to Individuals and Their Constraints
This response is a defense of the academic interest in the individual, which I take to be inclusive of the variety of ways that the activities of individuals are constrained, or not, in any given context. All constraints are not equal.
Veronique Altglas is to be commended for her intervention into the contemporary academic discussions and (often uncritical) usage of the concept of bricolage. As she rightly suggests, …
Shelby King
Shelby King is a graduate student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She is also a member of UCSB’s Religion, Experience, and Mind (REM) Lab, a working group for discourse and research related to the cognitive science of religion. Her research focuses on New Religious Movements, with particular interest […]
Véronique Altglas
Image courtesy of Brian O’Neill: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brian_oneill/15146826735/in/set-72157646842235687/ Véronique Altglas is a Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. Her main research interests lie in the globalisation of religion, new religious movements, religious exoticism, responses to cultural and religious diversity in Britain and France, and anti-Semitism. She completed her PhD at the Ecole […]
Afe Adogame
Dr Afe Adogame is Senior Lecturer in World Christianity & Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity. He holds a PhD in the History of Religions from the University of Bayreuth in Germany, where he served as a Teaching & Senior Research Fellow before joining the University of Edinburgh in 2005. His broad research interests […]
Ingvild Gilhus
Ingvild Sælid Gilhus is Professor of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is Vice-President of the International Association for the History of Religions (until 2015). She works in the areas of religion in late antiquity and new religious movements and her main publications include Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: laughter in the history of […]
Justin Lane
Justin received his DPhil from Oxford University’s Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, where his research focused on developing methods for quantifying social consensus and using big-data techniques for studying social cohesion in large-scale religious systems. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Modeling Social Systems and CTO at Prospectus Solutions. In […]
Stephen Gregg
Stephen Gregg is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, and the Hon. Secretary of the British Association for the Study of Religions. His background is in nineteenth-century Hindu philosophy, but in recent years he has specialised in minority religious movements, publically-projected religious identity, and method and theory in the Study of […]
What is the Study of Religion/s? Self-Presentations of the Discipline on University Web Pages
What is the study of religion\s and how is the nature of the discipline communicated to the public? This article provides a content analysis of the self-presentation of the study of religion\s on the internet by providing a content analysis of a sample of 101 university webpages (departments and programs) from 70 universities from 15 countries. In general, the meta-analysis of the state of the discipline according to its public self-presentation on the university web pages point to a rather limited degree of intellectual coherence. Reflexive statements, i.e. statements that self-critically address the parameters of the study of religion\s on a meta-level, are almost absent in our sample. In light of this analysis, this article suggests some “best practices” for online presentations of the study of religion\s.
Back in the SSSR: Reflections on the 2013 SSSR/RRA Conference
“Luckily, the overall tone of the conference and the attending scholars, were much warmer than the brisk weather outside the doors of the lovely Westin Waterfront Hotel. This conference report seeks to capture the unadulterated energy and excitement of a young scholar new to the social scientific study of religion and invite more established scholars to reflect on their early days in the field.”
CESNUR 2013 Conference Report
Not long after I arrived home following the 2013 CESNUR conference, having spent some forty-odd hours door-to-door flying from Sweden to Australia, I tweeted “Great conference, beautiful country, lovely people”. The lengthy transit (dare I say ‘pilgrimage’) usually involved in making one’s way to CESNUR from the Antipodes is never too much to bear, for despite being small the conference is always one filled with enthusiastic colleagues …