Talking Religion at 30,000 Feet
Posted: November 18, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: airplanes, books, religion dispatches, religious studies Leave a comment »Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America
by James Turner
University of Georgia Press , 2011
I lie a lot on airplanes. Not in any way that should upset the TSA or anything like that—just to the question “What do you do?” I don’t like admitting to strangers what it is I do. I’m a Ph.D. student in religious studies.
I always have a book with me when I fly because I’m always supposed to be reading something. These books are usually about religion and American history or culture. They often tip people off. A friend of mine, another religious studies Ph.D. student, tells the story of the time he was reading Isis Unveiled in a local coffee shop. He was approached by a very excited man with an interest in Theosophy and other sorts of New Thought systems who talked his ear off for an hour. My friend is Catholic and was reading the book as a bit of research for some project or another.
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Enacting Identity: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of Religions in Diaspora
Posted: June 2, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, conference paper, Conference Papers, diaspora, Hinduism, lived religion, religious studies 3 Comments »The following is another old conference paper. I gave the following paper on rethinking diaspora to the History of Religions section of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion in Atlanta, GA in March 2008.
The term diaspora seems to carry with it an imperative for interdisciplinary work. Diasporas are approached by Judaic studies, anthropology, sociology, Caribbean studies, and various other cultural and area studies disciplines. But what does religious studies have to offer for an understanding of diaspora? I argue that while anthropology offers strong theoretical definitions and models for what diasporas are and what they do, religious studies, through a study of lived religion, offers an understanding of how diasporas are experienced and lived out in ordinary daily life. In order to show how religious studies offers an “on the ground” understanding of life in a diaspora I take the example of South Asian Hindus living in the United States as my point of departure for two reasons. First, because Hinduism in the United States is an under studied tradition and, second, because when it is studied, studies of American Hinduism have yet to take on lived religion approach found in other studies of American religions. As such, the conclusion of this paper is a theoretical gesture toward the solution of these two disciplinary lacunas.
