K. Merinda Simmons

Keeping “critical” critical: A conversation from Culture on the Edge:

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

Protective Parroting: A Rejoinder to Atalia Omer

AbstractAtalia Omer’s essay “In the Critic vs. Caretaker Dichotomy A Magic Dwells: Parroting McCutcheon, Policing ‘Religion’ (A Rejoinder to Merinda Simmons)” responds to my MTSR article “Regulating Identities: The Silences of Critical Caretaking.” In this rejoinder to her response, I answer to her main critiques of my article, and I suggest that her distinction between the academy and “the real world” is a problematic one that exempts, and thus protects, scholarship from critique.

Setting the Table: A Conversation about Code Switching - Culture on the Edge

In its formative years, the discourse of “code switching” was largely linguistic in nature with a political bent toward debates regarding “proper” English and its alternatives and/or concerns over “linguistic difference” and issues of access and what has been dubbed for many years as closing the “achievement gap.” It is within this linguistic context that the term was adopted as a proxy for “variety” and “difference” more generally. Attention and focus was directed towards dialects, registers, and styles of speech patterns often assumed to “depart” from the normative (or “proper”) linguistic code or understanding within a normative context. More recently “Code Switching” has become a popular scholarly and general public concept taken up by a wide variety of sectors, fields and areas of study often used to reference the actions of a particular person/group that is assumed to break from their own “natural” practices to perform codes “not their own” for the purposes of fitting in, acquiring social capital, and accessing spaces that often perceive the “native” practices of the switcher as illegitimate or illegible. Whether distinguished and notable for judicial victories or to prove the inherent “linguistic” or “cultural” biases of measures such as standardized tests – it’s quite often the case that discourse on “code switching” is not only overly racialized but also assumes a learned ability for certain individuals and groups to shift/switch with a particular purpose in mind and the social actors doing the switching are almost always considered “marginal. The papers in this volume argue against the usual interpretation, contending that such focus on the switches of the “marginal” often assumes that the very thing that marginal groups – or certain “strategic” actors are shifting towards (the dominant group) is itself uncoded – or untethered from ideology. Thus, such encounters unduly leave power unchallenged without acknowledging or recognizing that we’re all shifting, switching – that variety is just prevalent in standard English as it is Ebonics – or “African American Language.” Furthermore, traditional approaches imply that shifting requires expertise, a claim that maintains and reproduces cleavages among the very marginal groups said to shift. Contributors to this volume challenge such interpretations by asking “When is a shift to an alternate mode of performance not a switch?” “How is it that some acquire the ‘skill’ to switch and others don’t? “Whose switch counts as a switch?”

Worlds Apart: The Essentials of Critical Thinking

In this essay, I consider what the publication of Schaffalitzky de Muckadell’s essay “On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion” in the JAAR reflects about the state of religious studies as a discipline, arguing that there appears increasing room for overt essentialism in the name of liberal humanism and progressive politics. Reflecting on this unfortunate trend in the academic study of religion, I ask that scholars clarify two things when engaging in critical thinking: the claims embedded in their own identifications and the audience with and to whom they aim to speak.

Regulating Identities: The Silences of Critical Caretaking

AbstractThis essay provides a critical response to Atalia Omer’s JAAR article in which she claims that Russell McCutcheon’s work stacks up a false dichotomy between critics and caretakers. Using a context of peace and conflict studies, Omer suggests that critical caretaking would give conversations in religious studies a “real world” relevance and would allow scholars to recuperate the voices of marginalized groups. In response to her call for recuperating silences, this essay looks at what silences are present within Omer’s essay itself and argues that notions like peace and conflict, as well as the margins themselves, are always identified and regulated, despite scholarly presentations of them as self-evident and naturally existing.

Scary Scholarship: A Response to Bruce Lincoln’s Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars

Bruce Lincolns recent book, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions, is a text whose critical offerings threaten analytical engagements that suggest that we answer to those subjects we study. Lincoln, instead, appeals to an uncompromising critical self-reflexiveness that, while potentially uncomfortable--and even scary--forces a vital conversation in the academic study of religion.

Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of Liberalism, Religion and the Private Sphere, by Craig Martin, Equinox Publishing: London, 2010, ix + 184 pp. ISBN 978 1 84553 705 0, US

primarily upon intellectual leaders (particularly male theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Walter Rauschenbusch, Paul Tillich, and other seminary professors), Klassen introduces her readers to laypeople, missionaries, and clergy who have contributed to a range of innovative but often overlooked healing practices (deaconess work, parish nursing, telepathy, and Christian yoga, for example). By analyzing even more familiar material – such as medical missions and the Emmanuel Movement – through the lenses of practice, Protestant ‘experimentalism,’ and ‘sacramentalism,’ Klassen provides new interpretations that enrich and nuance our understanding of liberal Protestant engagements with non-Christian religions (and especially with First Nations peoples in Canada), with the field of biomedicine, and with their own attempts to forge an identity rooted in Christian tradition yet open to modern epistemological and technological developments. As this summary suggests, Spirits of Protestantism engages with many of the most important historical and theoretical debates in the field of religious studies. This well-argued, clearly written, theoretically rigorous book can sometimes be a challenging read, especially given the multiple academic constituencies Klassen seeks to address: historians of Christianity, anthropologists of religion, and post-colonial theorists among them. Even so, Klassen works hard to make Spirits of Protestantism accessible by including compelling case studies that illustrate her arguments, and by carefully defining terms: both capacious concepts like liberal Protestantism and modernity, as well as more specific idioms such as medical enchantment, ritual proximity, technological sacramentalism, and holistic trinity. Throughout, Klassen draws upon a diverse range of archival documents, alongside her ethnographic fieldwork, to present a rich portrait of 20th-century Protestant liberalism in (and beyond) Canada. The result is a book that is methodologically astute, wide-ranging in its source materials and cast of characters, theoretically informed, and historiographically significant.