Craig Martin, Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College and writes on discourse analysis and ideology critique. His research and teaching focus on theoretical questions in the academic study of religion, typically related to discourse, ideology, and power. Some of my books include Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion, and the Private Sphere (Routledge 2010); Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion, Second Edition (Routledge, 2017); and Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture (Bloomsbury Academic 2021). He currently edits a book series with Bloomsbury titled Critiquing Religion: Discourse, Culture, Power.
In our final #RSPdiscourse of the season, editor Andie Alexander, Craig Martin, and Paul-François Tremlett consider the concept of "harm" & religion in recent legislation, Scotland elections, and AI & Religion.
This month's episode of Discourse! features Candace Mixon, Craig Martin, and Suzanne Owen discussing issues of religious freedom and rhetoric—you won't want to miss it!
Visit our archives to explore the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion. We explore questions such as "What is an 'insider' or 'outsider'?" and "How do scholars of religion study and engage 'insiders'?" to begin unpacking what all is at stake in this process of group formation.
In this episode, Dr. Craig Martin joins Savannah Finver to discuss his forthcoming book, Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture. Dr. Martin shares with us his motivations for writing this book, describes his primary methodologies and the key concepts he introduces in the text, and explains some of his thoughts on the utility of religion as a category of analysis in religious studies scholarship.
It's ideology, religion and conspiracy all the way in this month's Discourse! David G. Robertson is joined by Suzanne Owen and Craig Martin to discuss the Sun's mockery of pagans, problems with the Guardian's headline that people are returning to the Church, coronavirus conspiracies in India targetting Muslims, and how "idiology" (or one idiology, anyway) is pushing the religion out of religious studies.
Craig Martin writes of the lesson he learned from Timothy Fitzgerald's work: "Reading widely outside of religious studies allows us to integrate the knowledge from different fields or disciplines, making connections where theories or claims overlap, or noting where some approaches allow us to answer some of my questions in a more sophisticated way than other approaches."
"Religions are belief systems", "Religions are intrinsically violent", "Religion is Bullshit"... these are just some of the pervasive cliches that we might hear from time to time in the English-speaking world about our central topic of discussion on the RSP, 'religion'.
Ever wonder what it's like to complete the dissertation to first book process? How people find publishers? How much the publisher and editor influence the project? This podcast offers a roundtable discussion where six scholars discuss these questions and more. All six published some version of their dissertation, and they have unique insights and anecdotes to help explain and illumine this process.
Theory, from this perspective, is not something that’s added to a world that is already fully present to us; on the contrary, the things are after-effects of the theory. In this interview, Adam Miller speaks with Kathryn Lofton and John Modern about their new book series with University of Chicago Press, titled Class 200: New Studies in Religion.
This interview with Craig Martin explores the limits of identity formation under modern Capitalism. Martin's work Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie focuses on the ways in which culture and religion are produced for consumption.
Are we to believe those mountains weren’t here before humans came to name them?! Mountains, dammit! They’re real and they’re mind-independent! (It’s at this point that the radical constructionists ask, “can you say that without discourse?” and then the realists really go apoplectic.) Titus Hjelm’s book Social Constructionisms: Approaches to the Study of the Human World is a fantastic introduction to the topic of “social constructionism.”
Identity or Identification? In this second podcast for Identities? Week, the Culture on the Edge group address the issue of religious identity. Is our identity – cultural, religious or other – something which causes us to act, or something which we choose to mobilise in certain circumstances? And what part do scholars have in reifying these discourses?
In this week's podcast, We discussed some of the problems with the World Religion paradigm, most notably its colonial heritage and Christocentrism. Given its dominance in the public perception of "Religion", however, can we as teachers get away from it? Is there a pedagogical approach which focusses on issues of power and domination, and challenges, rather than reinforces, ...
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