There’s been lots of buzz, over the past decade or so, about material religion or embodied religion, as if this apparent emphasis on the empirical, the contingent, the historical, somehow gets us out of what many now see as the old rut of studying disembodied beliefs alone. Continue reading “Eliade Has Not Left the Building”
On Distinction
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“What’s Regular For You?”
A few years ago, when our main annual conference was held in Toronto, I walked into a Starbucks downtown, on my way to the convention centre (yes, that’s how Canadians spell it — deal with it). Apart from the curious (though once familiar) experience of all of us standing in a single line and then moving to one of the three open registers each in our turn (instead of my experience here in Tuscaloosa, where it’s each consumer for him/herself once a cashier opens), there was another moment in which the practical conditions of day-to-day life in TO (yeah, that’s what people in the know call it) made evident that a rather different sense of the the subject — of the individual-in-relation-to-the-group — was in operation north of the border.
On the E.G.
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Who are the Britons?
Watching “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” this weekend, I was struck by the scene where King Arthur introduces himself to a few of his subjects, who happen not to see themselves as his subjects. Continue reading “Who are the Britons?”