Blog – Page 14 – The Center for Critical Research on Religion

09 Nov

Jerry Lembcke, “CNN’s Tailwind Tale: At the Intersection of Journalism, Myth and Religion”

Posted by admin Posts and Discussion

On June 28, 1998, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece with the title “Memories of Wars Never Fought.” Written by Joe Sharkey, the article caught my eye because I had just finished a book on war and public memory. My research had taken me into the study of how groups of people remember major events like wars and how easily the boundary between memory and fantasy can be crossed. Sharkey’s article told about a story recently aired on the Cable News Network (CNN) and published in Time magazine claiming that the U.S. Army had secretly used nerve gas in 1970 to attack a group of its own soldiers who had defected to the North Vietnamese. As the title of Sharkey’s piece implied, the New York Times was skeptical of the CNN story.

I was more than skeptical. Indeed, my first thought was that the story was a hoax, something like the article that Alan Sokal published in the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, wrote a parody of the academic field known as literary criticism that was loaded with postmodern jargon in order to demonstrate that some of America’s leading intellectuals would publish nonsense if it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions. I thought some clever individuals had managed to “put one over” on the CNN reporters in the same manner. Perhaps the reporters themselves were implicated in the prank. In a few days, I was sure, someone, maybe even one of the tricksters, would step forward to reveal their mischievousness. (more…)

05 Oct

Çağdaş Dedeoğlu, “Myth, religion and science: Politics of framing anthropogenic climate change”

Posted by admin Posts and Discussion

We, as human beings, always seek some explanations in our life, mainly due to physical and psychological survival needs, and we do so based on some assumptions: our realities that we exchange with others. This is also true for explaining disasters. We all try to explain a disaster we face with our perception of reality. In their work about ‘appraising the meaning of disaster’, Grandjean et. al (2008: 195) state that ‘the human tendency to expect an effect proportionate to its cause could be the ultimate origin of our perception of justice’. In other words, our perception of justice is something related to our comprehension of reality. The question of why I faced this or that situation in my life is, in fact, a question about the perception of justice. Its implication is clear: Did I deserve this? (more…)

27 Sep

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “On neither burying nor praising religion”

Posted by admin Critical Research on Religion, CRR Volume 5, Issue 2, Responses to CRR Editorials

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050303217707250

20 Sep

Ceracela Voiculescu, “Nomad self-governance and disaffected power versus semiological state apparatus of capture: The case of Roma Pentecostalism”

Posted by admin Critical Research on Religion, CRR Volume 5, Issue 2

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050303217690894

19 Sep

Timothy Fitzgerald, “Abolishing Politics: categories as signs in an automatic signalling system”

Posted by admin Timothy Fitzgerald

For Foreword see: http://www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org/timothy-fitzgerald-abolishing-politics-foreword/

Introduction

This is a summary preamble to a detailed and complex argument, historical and theoretical, about the invention of politics as a modern idea, and its relation to a configuration of other modern categories. I believe that, in order for the human species to save itself from extinction, we at least need a widespread critical problematising of the dominant categories that organise our thinking, and that perform such a pervasive role in our representations of ‘reality’. When one considers how the dominant discourses on ‘politics’ actually operate in public rhetoric, in academic texts, and in our internalised representations, then politics ceases to look like the road to our salvation, and appears as part of our problem.

The argument is addressed primarily to those readers who share the author’s view that, if the human species is to survive, then we need a radical change amounting to a revolution in our thinking, in our morality and in our relationships. This is already a widely held viewpoint, I am not a prophet offering a new insight, but unfortunately it does not seem to press itself with urgency on those who put their personal careers above everything else – i.e. our leaders. The question for me is not whether we need a radical change in consciousness, but how we should make that change possible. (more…)