Address: Welch Professor of American Studies and Professor of History
Department of American Studies
University of Notre Dame
1047 Flanner Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
... Carter, in the foreword to the published version of the report, found in American museums a m... more ... Carter, in the foreword to the published version of the report, found in American museums a much ... For the would-be colonial aristocrat, culture was defined in metropolitan Eu-rope ... In addition to Chinese wallpapers, porcelains, and garden temples, furniture fashioned by Thomas ...
“What religion is,” argues that if religion matters, then definitions do too. Definitions of reli... more “What religion is,” argues that if religion matters, then definitions do too. Definitions of religion have practical implications and real-life effects. Many political constitutions, for example, use the word religion. But it is not always clear what it means. There are passionate debates about how to define religion, as looking at one court case involving ordinary religious practices linked with Africa shows. That case illustrates that definitions can be controversial. Those who have tried to characterize religion have used different metaphors to understand it and offered different judgments about whether it is helpful or harmful. What religion is can also be analyzed by considering important definitions, from more critical accounts by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to more sympathetic ones by William James and Émile Durkheim.
“How religion is expressed,” aims to understand how religion functions by looking at how religion... more “How religion is expressed,” aims to understand how religion functions by looking at how religion is mediated and expressed. Contrary to some writers who have been called mystics, the author suggests there is no unmediated religious experience. Religion is mediated by institutions and technologies, and also by the body and the senses. The brain shapes thinking and feeling. It orients adherents in time and space and shapes how sensory input is classified and how emotions are expressed. The embodied experience of religion is expressed through sound, smell, taste, touch, and sight. Religion is also expressed in diverse cultural forms. There are eight modes of religious expression: experiencing, imagining, making, narrating, conceptualizing, enacting, performing, and gathering.
Estudiosos em cada campo possuem pressuposições, incluindo noções sobre a natureza da verdade e d... more Estudiosos em cada campo possuem pressuposições, incluindo noções sobre a natureza da verdade e do status da teoria, assim, partindo de minha própria teoria espacial da religião, comecei a questionar qual matriz filosófica parece ser mais promissora para o estudo interdisciplinar da geografia e religião. Defendo que o pragmatismo, especialmente aquele expresso nos últimos escritos do filósofo Hilary Putnam, pode ser útil para responder algumas das mais incomodas questões epistemológicas. Para evidenciar a utilidade de minha teoria, e sua perspectiva pragmática em questões fundamentais sobre sentido, verdade e interpretação, arremato considerando suas implicações para o estudo interdisciplinar da geografia e religião, bem como identifico alguns princípios teóricos norteadores.
“Global religion today” begins with a snapshot of religion today, when more than eight-in-ten peo... more “Global religion today” begins with a snapshot of religion today, when more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. Religion has played an important role in public life since 1945. In the postwar period it was difficult to say whether religion—and the nationalist impulses and industrial economies it sanctioned—was bringing things together or pulling them apart. That question was even harder to answer after the 1970s, when politically assertive religion staged a comeback, global flows intensified, and environmental damage accelerated. At this moment, we face unresolved crises inherited from the colonial and industrial eras—and are bequeathing new problems to those who follow us. However, there are some reasons for hope. Adherents around the world are mobilizing religion’s resources to meet the challenges in this era when we are brought together by fiber optic cables, global consumer culture, and interfaith peace efforts, but also pulled apart by rising nationalisms, climate changes, and holy wars.
All scholars in the human sciences use interpretive categories. Those theoretical tools may be em... more All scholars in the human sciences use interpretive categories. Those theoretical tools may be employed to make empirical claims that can be confirmed or disputed, but the categories themselves are not true or false. They are more or less adequate for the researcher’s purposes. In other words, we assess those categories by appealing to pragmatic criteria. Focusing on the conceptual implications and interpretive effects of scholars’ linguistic usage, in this essay I discuss a cluster of related categories, especially everyday life, and assess their utility for the study of religion. It is important to note at the start that all categories—the terms and phrases used to guide research—afford a particular angle of vision. In turn, they all have blind spots. In some ways, the history of the study of religion— and all fields and subfields—has been a process of ceaseless change as one perspective replaces another, as scholars claim that the prevailing category—
... Carter, in the foreword to the published version of the report, found in American museums a m... more ... Carter, in the foreword to the published version of the report, found in American museums a much ... For the would-be colonial aristocrat, culture was defined in metropolitan Eu-rope ... In addition to Chinese wallpapers, porcelains, and garden temples, furniture fashioned by Thomas ...
“What religion is,” argues that if religion matters, then definitions do too. Definitions of reli... more “What religion is,” argues that if religion matters, then definitions do too. Definitions of religion have practical implications and real-life effects. Many political constitutions, for example, use the word religion. But it is not always clear what it means. There are passionate debates about how to define religion, as looking at one court case involving ordinary religious practices linked with Africa shows. That case illustrates that definitions can be controversial. Those who have tried to characterize religion have used different metaphors to understand it and offered different judgments about whether it is helpful or harmful. What religion is can also be analyzed by considering important definitions, from more critical accounts by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to more sympathetic ones by William James and Émile Durkheim.
“How religion is expressed,” aims to understand how religion functions by looking at how religion... more “How religion is expressed,” aims to understand how religion functions by looking at how religion is mediated and expressed. Contrary to some writers who have been called mystics, the author suggests there is no unmediated religious experience. Religion is mediated by institutions and technologies, and also by the body and the senses. The brain shapes thinking and feeling. It orients adherents in time and space and shapes how sensory input is classified and how emotions are expressed. The embodied experience of religion is expressed through sound, smell, taste, touch, and sight. Religion is also expressed in diverse cultural forms. There are eight modes of religious expression: experiencing, imagining, making, narrating, conceptualizing, enacting, performing, and gathering.
Estudiosos em cada campo possuem pressuposições, incluindo noções sobre a natureza da verdade e d... more Estudiosos em cada campo possuem pressuposições, incluindo noções sobre a natureza da verdade e do status da teoria, assim, partindo de minha própria teoria espacial da religião, comecei a questionar qual matriz filosófica parece ser mais promissora para o estudo interdisciplinar da geografia e religião. Defendo que o pragmatismo, especialmente aquele expresso nos últimos escritos do filósofo Hilary Putnam, pode ser útil para responder algumas das mais incomodas questões epistemológicas. Para evidenciar a utilidade de minha teoria, e sua perspectiva pragmática em questões fundamentais sobre sentido, verdade e interpretação, arremato considerando suas implicações para o estudo interdisciplinar da geografia e religião, bem como identifico alguns princípios teóricos norteadores.
“Global religion today” begins with a snapshot of religion today, when more than eight-in-ten peo... more “Global religion today” begins with a snapshot of religion today, when more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. Religion has played an important role in public life since 1945. In the postwar period it was difficult to say whether religion—and the nationalist impulses and industrial economies it sanctioned—was bringing things together or pulling them apart. That question was even harder to answer after the 1970s, when politically assertive religion staged a comeback, global flows intensified, and environmental damage accelerated. At this moment, we face unresolved crises inherited from the colonial and industrial eras—and are bequeathing new problems to those who follow us. However, there are some reasons for hope. Adherents around the world are mobilizing religion’s resources to meet the challenges in this era when we are brought together by fiber optic cables, global consumer culture, and interfaith peace efforts, but also pulled apart by rising nationalisms, climate changes, and holy wars.
All scholars in the human sciences use interpretive categories. Those theoretical tools may be em... more All scholars in the human sciences use interpretive categories. Those theoretical tools may be employed to make empirical claims that can be confirmed or disputed, but the categories themselves are not true or false. They are more or less adequate for the researcher’s purposes. In other words, we assess those categories by appealing to pragmatic criteria. Focusing on the conceptual implications and interpretive effects of scholars’ linguistic usage, in this essay I discuss a cluster of related categories, especially everyday life, and assess their utility for the study of religion. It is important to note at the start that all categories—the terms and phrases used to guide research—afford a particular angle of vision. In turn, they all have blind spots. In some ways, the history of the study of religion— and all fields and subfields—has been a process of ceaseless change as one perspective replaces another, as scholars claim that the prevailing category—
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1997
... Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data Numrich, Paul David, 1952-Old wisdom in th... more ... Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Data Numrich, Paul David, 1952-Old wisdom in the New World : Americanization in two ... Balangoda Ananda Maitreya ... I hope the monk featured by the Times, along with the many immigrant Theravada Buddhists now living in this ...
In a lecture in Horticultural Hall in Boston on Sunday 3 March 1872 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, t... more In a lecture in Horticultural Hall in Boston on Sunday 3 March 1872 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the social reformer and religious radical, praised “The Character of the Buddha.” He ended his very sympathetic portrait by alluding to King Asoka's discovery of the tomb of the Buddha. Those who opened the tomb, so the story goes, found the lamps that had been lighted two hundred years earlier still burning and the flowers that had been offered in homage still fresh and fragrant. Higginson saw a parallel to his own age: “More than two thousand years have now passed, and we are opening this tomb again; the lights still burn, the flowers are still fresh, the perfume of that noble life, yet remains immortal.” In some ways, Higginson's comment seems appropriate: literate Americans of his generation were learning more and more about Buddhism and its founder; and, although most interpreters during the 1860s and 1870s struggled with its distinctiveness, some found Buddha's life and ...
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