What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health...

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories...

For the New Year, let’s recall two milestones on the Christian Right from the past year. One of the key architects of that movement, Pat...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...

If you followed me on the wordpress site where I started blogging in 2017, perhaps you've clicked over to this site by now. Or perhaps...

I wrote this history of transformations in the academic study of religion at the University of Tennessee: both macro changes in the...

In the first and second sections of this three-part post—introduced here and expanded from an article in the Encyclopedia of American...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five.  Here is...

I've built up several cheesy but memorable “mottos” for the academic study of religion, to use in teaching. The focus today is “this...

NOTE: I am publishing tomorrow, in October 2024, a note to link back to this article which has continuing relevance even though it first...

…Or… if you want to watch, or already did—if you are into that sort of thing—let’s compare notes. The production was fascinating in...

There isn’t much point in sending readers of this little blog to Reading Religion, the American Academy of Religion’s review portal—I...

In few days I head to my summer writing place, a log cabin in the Wisconsin north woods where my mom grew up. It's about halfway between...

I've imagined this as a place to gather and repost—when timely and useful—earlier pieces that are “blog-friendly” but scattered to the...

In both classes I am teaching this term, I heard matter-of-fact comments about how end-times theologies correlate with “fatalism”—which...

My previous post explained why “refereed” publications—those vetted by expert academic gatekeepers—do not reliably signal scholarly...

I should not be writing this! I absolutely have better things to do by almost any measure. Yet I have been asked to clarify which of my...

This is day 40 or more (depending on how one counts) of a major strike in British universities, which has been nearly ignored by the...

This essay is lightly revised from a talk I gave in 2009 on the occasion of my teacher, David Noble, retiring from the University of...

Yesterday I read this piece in the New York Times by Molly Worthen. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments thread, which...