The conflict between religion and media has deep roots

A recent report into the place of religion in public life presented a gloomy picture of the relationship between media and religion. Whilst media misrepresentations usually concern Muslims, the most vocal complainers are Christians. Abby Day argues the reason for this may lie in more fundamental, ancient and even ontological concerns

Non-religious Christians

Scholars who recently rejected secularisation theses on the grounds that they were insufficiently defined or contextualised now seem to be accepting with unseemly, uncritical haste, the new, in vogue notion of the post-secular. Scholars seem tempted to drop the term ‘post-secular’ into their papers and presentations as if it is a generally accepted and understood term. It is not and nor, as this paper will argue, is it plausible unless applied to a limited and specific range of phenomena. Far from disappearing, religion is often used publicly as a marker of group identity. This is not a return to religion, or a resurgence in spirituality, but a fluctuating form of contextualised religious identity. Christian nominalists may not believe in God or Jesus, at least if belief is understood as ‘faith’. It would be incorrect, however, to dismiss them as ‘unbelievers’, or their nominalist beliefs as not having essential or substantive reality. They believe in many things, usually related to ‘belonging’. By closely examining people’s sense of Christian ‘belonging’, we find other more subtle, interwoven ‘belongings’ related to, for example, history, nation, morality, gender, and ‘culture’

Textbooks for teaching the sociology of religion

The sociology of religion, a vibrant sub-discipline of sociology, is popular amongst students taking degrees in Sociology, Theology, and Religious Studies. Teachers are often not sociology specialists and seek a standard text to help with classes. Others, who specialise in sociology, have usually no background in the study of religion. His review surveys the field of books recommended by teachers and students and finds few to wholly recommend. The author calls for texts to be more inclusive, less dogmatic, and more directed to best pedological practice

Towards increasing diversity in the study of religion

The study of religion needs to be enriched by more diverse voices. The author argues that some progress has been made, but more needs to be done, particularly through collaborating with those most frequently muted. The challenge is to not simply to include those outside the traditional bastions of white, male privilege in the global north, but to actively widen the current reach to make an impact on how knowledge is actually created and shared. Initiatives such as liberating and de-colonizing the curriculum are discussed, with particular reference to the study of religion

Como escribir artículos académicos-científicos publicables

El famoso escritor de ciencia-ficción Ray Bradbury lo dijo muy bien: “Si usted escribe cien cuentos cortos y todos son malos, eso no significa que usted ha fracasado. Uno fracasa sólo cuando deja de escribir”. El texto de Ray Bradbury es una de las interesantes citas de este artículo que invita a los académicos a escribir. En él se analizan las razones más comunes que dan los profesores para publicar sus trabajos y, por su puesto, los motivos más frecuentes que aducen para no publicar.  Pero, en el fondo, todos los profesores quieren hacerlo. Sin embargo, cuando piensan en un trabajo sesudo para una revista científica, los asalta una multitud de dudas. De ahí que este artículo, de manera ordenada, presente una completa y sencilla guía del proceso que suele seguirse, respondiendo las preguntas que surgen inevitablemente. Por ejemplo, ¿Cuál es el objetivo que se busca con el tema del artículo? ¿Qué se entiende por calidad y cómo se aplica a un escrito destinado para una revista científica? ¿Quién hace la evaluación y cual es su papel? ¿A quiénes va dirigido el artículo y qué esperan? Finalmente, ¿cómo es posible garantizar su aceptación? Posteriormente, se hace una descripción completa del cúmulo de tareas que es necesario realizar para lograr “un artículo perfecto en siete días”: la estructura, el primer borrador, la elaboración de un abstract y la revisión

Anthropology of Ministry

A chapter in an edited collection - The Study of Ministry, This chapter The chapter explores anthropology as a discipline committed to exploring what it means to be human. In so doing, it privileges the human, or social, over the apparent divine. An anthropology of ministry may contrive to do both, to hold in comfortable tension this world/other world

Sacred communities: contestations and connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries

Best Practices for Queer Metadata

This document is the result of two years of work by a group of nearly one hundred knowledge organisers, cataloguers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the metadata treatment of queer people, communities, and items in GLAMS (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Special Collections) and other informational institutions. Their work has been supported by over 800 peer reviewers; combined, these groups make up the Queer Metadata Collective (QMDC). The QMDC builds upon earlier work done by the Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC), a similarly-organised group of metadata workers and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the metadata representation of trans and gender-diverse people. The work of the TMDC culminated in Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources, focusing on the description, cataloguing, and classification of information resources as well as the creation of metadata about trans and gender-diverse people, including authors, communities, and other creators. Following the publication of the Best Practices, several TMDC members founded and developed the QMDC over the summer of 2022. This document focuses on metadata by and about queer people, communities, and resources. While there is significant overlap between queer metadata and trans and gender diverse metadata, QMDC’s recommendations should not be seen as excluding or superseding TMDC’s, as trans and gender diverse people, communities, and resources have specific needs. For best practices and recommendations about trans and gender-diverse resources, please consult the TMDC document. If the TMDC and QMDC recommendations conflict (we are not aware of any instances in which they do), prefer the TMDC document for trans and gender diverse resources and the QMDC for other types of queer resources.UT Librarie