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Category - critical religion

  • August 5, 2013
    Faith and beliefs today: how do we go forward?

    Twenty years ago, many public commentators believed that religion was dead, or at least 'on the way out'. How wrong that proved. Simon Barrow looks at how the conversation about faith is deepening and broadening in the face of growing religious and non-religious diversity.

  • January 27, 2013
    Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the changing face of academia

    What sort of work can any academic department achieve when it is fenced into a little box with no room to manoeuvre of its own accord? Jonathan Tuckett, who is doing research in phenomenology at the University of Stirling, asks the question with regard to an appraisal of issues and dilemmas related to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the culture of - often imprecise - measurement and categorisation increasingly imposed upon universities and colleges.

  • December 24, 2012
    Who defines religion in the colony?

    The critical religion school has taught us to see the colonial invention of world religions and their relegation to private space, says Alex Henley from the University of Manchester. But an emphasis on the bulldozing force of secular colonial power may obscure the resilience of local histories. This article is a reflection on a recent workshop discussion with Professor Ahmed Ragab and Dr Aria Nakissa at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

  • December 18, 2012
    Religion, feminism and gender-making theory

    What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making? The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh still haunt us, says Dr Alison Jasper, in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence.

  • December 18, 2012
    Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

    It is widely acknowledged among those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble, says Dr Michael Marten from the University of Stirling. The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification. Alternative perspectives and mechanisms are badly needed, he says.

  • December 3, 2012
    Law, critical religion, and the importance of semantics

    The work of scholars in critical religion may indeed concentrate on the semantics of 'religion', but this is far from being 'merely' an academic issue, points out Gabrielle Desmarais from the University of Ottawa. The meaning of the word 'religion' and the language used to regulate that definition are at the forefront of a range of constitutional cases about new religious movements.

  • December 3, 2012
    Blurring the boundaries: punk rock and religion

    In today's world we face a vast range of human practices which are overlapping and do not function as religious or secular solely or discreetly, says Francis Stewart. He illustrates this in relation to his extensive research into punk music.

  • December 2, 2012
    Christianity, Beauvoir and the cultivation of female genius

    Eighty people came to Glasgow University Chapel for the launch of two important new books on religion on 21 November 2012.

  • November 9, 2012
    The breadth of Critical Religion: critiquing self-regulating markets and other divinities

    To coincide with the launch of the new Critical Religion Association website, Dr Timothy Fitzgerald, Reader in Languages, Cultures and Religions at the University of Stirling, reflects on the broadening of Critical Religion's work and perspective. Critiquing the beliefs-systems of self-regulating markets is a key way of interrogating and re-understanding the discursive spaces marked out by the terms 'religion' and 'politics', he suggests. [Ekklesia is a partner of the CRA]

  • November 9, 2012
    New site for the Critical Religion Association

    Today we are pleased to have launched the new Critical Religion Association and website (http://criticalreligion.org) - a new site, with many pages imported from a site hosted by the University of Stirling. That site still exists (http://www.criticalreligion.stir.ac.uk/), and is now exclusively about the Critical Religion Research Group (CRRG) based at Stirling. So why this new site?