Cris

LATEST ARTICLES ( 560 )

• Learning the Summer Course

  

  The past 7 weeks have been something of a (hot) blur. Two of those were spent preparing to teach an anthropology of religion course and the next five were... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Gopnik, Lamanite

  

  Insofar as I can tell, the only positive in this presidential campaign is all the light being shed on one candidate’s curious religion. For understandable... Read more

  Posted on 12 August 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Pussy Rioting Russian Orthodoxy

  

  Over at The New Republic, Julia Ioffe reports on the high farce that is the Pussy Riot trial. The indictment is a thing of inquisitorial beauty: The prosecutor... Read more

  Posted on 09 August 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Nation-State Or “Civil” Religions

  

  My students and I are finishing up a superb summer course by looking at what Robert Bellah and others call “civil religion.” To this end, I am re-purposing a... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Legitimating & Divining in Rome

  

  “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” With this famous sentence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterful critique of political power. Less wel... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2012 CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Cosmic Consciousness

  

  Over at The Morning News, Tim Doody has published a powerful piece on Dr. James Fadiman and his lifelong psychological research into, and on, psychedelics. It i... Read more

  Posted on 29 July 2012 DEBATE, HISTORY, PSYCHOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY

• Magic, Superstition & Supernatural

  

  Over at Lapham’s Quarterly, Colin Dickey sympathetically examines superstition, magic, and the supernatural. It’s such a good essay that I’m going to have my... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2012 CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Cosmic Economy of Sharing

  

  As long-time readers probably know, I’ve long denigrated claims that what we today call “religion” originated during the Upper Paleolithic because early... Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2012 DEBATE, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY

• Mormonism as Evolutionary Exemplar

  

  While teaching this past week, a curious thing happened: without having given it much thought, I found myself using Mormonism to illustrate all kinds of... Read more

  Posted on 21 July 2012 CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Theory of Ritualized Behavior

  

  In my anthropology of religion course, we are now looking at ritual. While preparing for class, I reviewed a recent synopsis of ritual theory which is so good... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Dissing the Dalai Lama

  

  About I month ago I came across Stalin’s Moustache, an eccentric and entertaining blog where professor Roland Boer engages in critical play. Read more

  Posted on 17 July 2012 BIOLOGY, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Victor Turner’s Ritual Density

  

  It is only fitting that Victor Turner, a cultural anthropologist, wrote one of the famous articles ever to have graced the august pages of one of my favorite... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Mormon Garmies & Ghost Dance Shirts

  

  Once we get past the sniggering, Mormon underwear (officially known to Mormons as “temple garments” and unofficially as “garmies”) presents a fascinating site o... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2012 CULTURE, HISTORY, RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY

• Risible Nonsense

  

  Having just finished Robert Bellah’s magisterial Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011), a book which sympathetically treats... Read more

  Posted on 07 July 2012 DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• One Flew Over the Cuckold’s Nest

  

  It’s the bane of manly existence everywhere: to be a cuckold. Or so the story goes. It seems to be taken for granted, in both evolutionary biology and... Read more

  Posted on 04 July 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Every Hair Is Numbered

  

  In this fabulous passage from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, a book which led to Giordano Bruno being burned at the Vatican’s inquisitorial stake in... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE, HISTORY

• Anthropology of Religion (Summer Course)

  

  Over the past week I’ve been working on the syllabus for the anthropology of religion course I will be teaching this summer. Summer courses are strange beasts... Read more

  Posted on 01 July 2012 RELIGION

• Crow (Absaroke) Shamaness

  

  Although there is a vast literature on ethnohistoric shamanism, not much of it discusses the way in which shamanic practice is gendered. This is an interesting... Read more

  Posted on 28 June 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION

• Grand Old Scholar Huston Smith

  

  He has been billed on book leaves as “the most learned and literary contemporary writer on the history of religions” and in newspapers as “one of the world’s... Read more

  Posted on 26 June 2012 BOOKS, CULTURE, DEBATE, RELIGION

• Naturalistic Platonism

  

  Plato is usually associated with a metaphysics that flows naturally toward religion and becomes a sort of religion with Christianity, which Nietzsche famously... Read more

  Posted on 24 June 2012 BIOLOGY, CULTURE, DEBATE, HISTORY, RELIGION