ivan.Strenski@ucr.edu'
Culture

Robert Bellah’s Powerful Legacy: A Mixed Blessing for Religious Studies?

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When we talk of a department of religious studies being the breeding grounds for a “new religious consciousness” together with Bellah’s evangelizing for republican civil religion, along with his desire to inform a “a new way of being religious within modern culture,” we can easily see how Bellah got the Berkeley secularists running for their guns. What was Bellah, a sociologist, thinking, anyway? Had he forgotten all he learned and taught about first-order religious institutions? 

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Politics/Law

Was Islam Responsible for the Boston Bombings, or Was “Internet Islam”?

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RD bloggers have rightly asked the question of the depth of the “piety” of the Tsarnaevs. That too misses a vital point. I do not for a moment discount the sincerity of the feelings for Islam by the Tsarnaev brothers. But, what Islam was the object of those feelings? I would offer that it was for an “Internet Islam”—for an abstract, compact, easily rendered Islam, fed by the representations flowing from out of the ether!

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(A)theologies, Election 2012

Sacrifice, Suffering, and Rick Santorum

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Of course, in today’s pussy-footing, self-censoring public talk about religion, we never ask how Isabella feels about being the occasion for edifying “sacrifice” by the Santorums? It is fine for Rick Santorum to tell us how such sacrifice has deepened his faith, strengthened the bonds uniting their family, and so on. Good for him. Moreover, Santorum would want no pity from me. He identifies with the uplifting narrative of sacrificing for the sake of others, protecting the weak, championing “life,” building character by overcoming adversity, seeing blessing where others see only curses, and so on. But I find all this attention to the suffering and sacrifice of Rick Santorum more than a little self-centered—a kind of spiritual egoism. 

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