Academic Conference Rules
A great New Yorker cartoon that well captures the posturing of Q&A at academic conferences.
Room for Theology in “Theory”: New Signs in SAQ
A few years back, Eugene McCarraher’s review of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory posed the question: “After Theory, Theology?” It was a brilliant review of an excellent book and got to the heart of matters in the current state of “theory” (that strange, amorphous mix of continental philosophy marshaled across a range of disciplines in order…
Douthat on Smith on Religious “Knowledge”
Over at his NYTimes “Evaluations” blog, I appreciated Ross Douthat’s engagement with my “off the cuff” piece on the Pew Survey on Religious Knowledge (also noted at the Atlantic‘s “Daily Dish” blog). While he’s sympathetic to my second thesis, Douthat raises a fair point by asking: Can one be a serious practitioner of Catholic Christianity…
Men at Forty
BY DONALD JUSTICE Men at forty Learn to close softly The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to. At rest on a stair landing, They feel it moving Beneath them now like the deck of a ship, Though the swell is gentle. And deep in mirrors They rediscover The face of the…
On the Pew Survey of Religious Knowledge @ Immanent Frame
The Pew Forum’s “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey” has generated some press and buzz (see the New York Times report, for instance). In response, the folks at Immanent Frame have assembled one of their “off the cuff” features on the survey, “Surveying Religious Knowledge.” It includes brief assessments from an interdisciplinary cast of scholars. You’ll also…
Review of “Hipster Christianity”
The Other Journal has now posted “Poser Christianity,” my review of McCracken’s Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. The review goes in a particular direction, because I think McCracken was asking for it. But I should note that there are some points of overlapping concern. For example, I think McCracken is right to see…