Kathryn Lofton

The American spiritual culture : and the invention of jazz, football, and the movies

Part 1: God the Opaque (1) Scepticism (2) Displaced People (3) Pragmatism (4) Mystery Part 2: American the Invisible

Religious history as religious studies

What is the relationship between religious studies and religious history? Academic historical thinking emerged in part to repudiate ecclesiastical traditions of history, making the difference between religious history and histories of religion a question of denominational rivalry more than a difference in sect. Scholars working in the academic study of religion and the academic study of history have increased self-consciousness of this contingency but have not developed an account for the consequence of history as the primary mode for our thinking. As a result, scholars of religion frequently fall silent in the wake of postcolonial critiques of religious subjects, believing their work is adequately buttressed when this history (the history of the relationship between colonial oppression and religious classification) is acknowledged. Yet this is only the beginning of our work. Religious history cannot evade the methodological challenges of religious studies precisely because to identify an object as religious is to begin an inquiry into the subject of religion itself. Using the example of the year 1893, the author seeks to demonstrate how scholars of history might justify their subjects as religious, and how scholars of religion might consider their concept of history.

Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief

Abstract What is belief? Is it a usable categorical for analysis in the study of religion? This was the subject of a one-day workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University on April 15, 2011. The participating scholars were asked to present comments on the meaning of belief for their own research. This text introduces a sampling of these responses prompted in part by a set of advance readings that represented the bibliography of belief in contemporary religious studies.

Religion and the American Celebrity

In American culture, is the celebrity a divine figure, or just another commodity in the marketplace? The author maps a series of strategies for the study of celebrities within the study of religion and America, focusing on the concomitant production of Britney Spears as a religious figure, a religious sacrifice, and a consumer product.

Public confessions: Oprah Winfrey's American religious history

Nothing in The Oprah Winfrey show is a surprise. The shows arc is so commonplace, so predictable, that it is the premise of her viewers rapt attention: they watch to experience the familiar ritual turn of daily confession and rejuvenation. That Winfrey herself is a particular type—a loudly “spiritual”, self-declared “black woman”—only compels viewers further into her corporeal and material utopia. Through her carefully racial self-descriptions, Winfrey transforms her talk show studio into the imagined black church, making a commodity of the very authenticity that propagates her own persistence in the public sphere. This essay deploys two moments in US religious history—the antebellum revivalism of Charles Finney and the 1893 Worlds Parliament of Religions—to posit particular analogies to Oprahs religious and racial scripts in the televised public sphere. From these moments, we will find that Oprahs codes of conduct are knit into the religious history of her national stage.

Christians under covers: evangelicals and sexual pleasure on the Internet

This briskly written and carefully disciplined book explores the semipublic world of the Internet in order to understand Christian sexuality. Or is this a book that explores sexuality in order to understand the Internet? The exciting fact is that it does both: through a close study of 36 websites purporting to offer advice about Christian sexuality, Kelsey Burke tells us something about how the Internet works as a social space and about how self-identified Christians police their own sexuality. The latter is a subject that has become the focus of significant scholarly interest over the last 15 years, including insightful works by Amy DeRogatis, Tanya Erzen, Lynne Gerber, Marie Griffith, Mark Jordan, and Ludger Viefhues-Bailey. Because of their work, some of what Burke reports from her ethnographic scene is predictable. We know, for example, that self-identified Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy and salvation by Jesus Christ alone tend also to think that people should remain virgins until their wedding night and that differences between men and women are natural and innate. We know, too, that evangelicals are early subscribers to any and every new media form, grabbing hold of print and radio, phonograph and TV in order to deploy every possible conduit for the articulation of the Word. For this reason, it is unsurprising that evangelicals have a wide range of digital media – online message boards, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Bible studies – to engage about any number of subjects. What might still be surprising to some is how heartily those forms of media encourage manifold forms sexual expression to their presumptively conservative Christian readers. To be sure, DeRogatis and Viefhues-Bailey make clear in their work that evangelicals want to prescribe positive sexual relations between the appropriately complementary married partners. After reviewing about 12,000 online comments, Burke gets even more specific. One of her key findings is that Christian sexuality website users tend to be much more judgmental about who is having sex than what people do sexually. As one blogger explains,

Ivan Strenski, Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion

more timely and relevant to the contemporary situation on the continent where political upheaval and massive migration is becoming all too frequent. The tension between continuity and change, so central to history of religions, is especially germane to the subject of the ongoing vitality of indigenous religions under the pressures of war and migration. Silva does note that during colonialism, “the Luvale etiological pantheon had expanded considerably to include new kinds of afflicting agents” represented by jipelo (12). She finds it puzzling that in the 1990s “the lipele baskets had no jipelo that bespoke directly or indirectly of contemporary politics. There were no material representations of war victims, war perpetrators, or war refugees; no new additions to the etiological pantheon” (13). One wonders whether divination, an “activity that prioritizes continuity,” resists change when sustaining a culture in exile or whether its forms may have evolved in the intervening years to reflect the larger context that has clearly contributed to the private miseries of its consulters. Silva’s close study makes a valuable addition to the growing repertoire of ethnographic accounts of divination in Africa and the peoples who continue to invoke it as a pivotal cultural institution. She shows it to be an essential “tool for living,” even—and perhaps especially—in contemporary society, fragmented by politics and made transitory by migration. It is a tightly woven work that parallels the craftsmanship that Silva details in her study of divinatory baskets. For this reason, at first blush, the book’s narrow focus might not readily appeal to those who are neither specialists of Africa nor scholars of divination as a comparative phenomenon. Yet Silva’s analysis interweaves broad themes particularly relevant to historians of religions: the relation of material culture to religion and art, notions of personhood and their relationship to moral systems, and the dynamics of gender relations in ritual and society. There is exciting potential here for further exploration of these and other critical issues to which Silva only lightly alludes. Like a lipele itself, shaken to stir the emblematic elements it contains and to yield new meanings, this book may be profitably exploited as a resource from which to mine valuable insights for religious studies, ritual studies, and performance theory.

The Body (Under Review):On Manuel Vásquez’s More than Belief

Abstract What sort of critique of religious studies will enjoin religious studies to think about its premises? This essay evaluates an important contemporary critique of the study of religion, Manuel Vasquez’s More than Belief. The author provides a summary of Vasquez’s argument, and then turns to an analysis of Vasquez’s evidence. In More than Belief, Vasquez tracks the development and effects of mind-body dualism on the study of religion. The differentiation between mind and body is a problem for analysts of religion, Vasquez explains, because religious ideas wrestle so directly with that differentiation, and because scholars seeking to explain religion have often imagined themselves to be countering religious supernaturalism with a materialist empiricism. This is, Vasquez explains, a reductive materialism. Vasquez thus offers an account of how matter came not to matter in the specific effort to explain religion, which Vasquez describes as the somatophobia of religious studies. Borrowing from Vasquez’s emphasis on embodiment and emplacement, the reviewer questions Vasquez’s readings of philosophical materials in his admirable effort to correct a disciplinary disposition for our hermeneutic betterment.