Interrogating Richard Dawkins
Over at Spiegel, Markus Becker and Frank Patalong have posted an interview with Richard Dawkins, whose latest book — The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution — has just been published in...
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Supernatural Punishment Theory: History Free Zone?
Over at the Evolution of Religion Project, Dominic Johnson comments on the first target article which will appear in what promises to be a fantastic new journal, Religion, Brain, and Behavior. Because...
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Religious Evolution: Sami Sticks & Phoenician Stones
Unlike living organisms, cultural formations do not “evolve.” Evolution, sensu stricto, is a biological process and not a cultural one. Despite this fact, some scholars have fruitfully deployed...
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Lost in (Western) Translation
There is a sense in which we are all cultural narcissists. By this, I mean that because all of us are acculturated at a particular time and in a particular place, we have a strong tendency to view...
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Smashing Daniel Dennett’s Spell
Several years ago I read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). It wasn’t easy. This is not because Dennett’s ideas and arguments are difficult (they aren’t). It...
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Forgotten Founder: James George Frazer
The standard origins story of cultural anthropology includes two founders: Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) and Henry Lewis Morgan (1818-1881). Unlike most founders, Tylor and Morgan are not widely...
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Classifying Cultures: Grade v. Clade
When we account for human history in evolutionist or developmental terms, we nearly always fall into the trap of teleology and progressivism. Even when evolutionist schemes are carefully and...
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Primitivist Assumption
A new study in Science investigated lethal aggression in 21 hunter-gatherer societies and concluded that most deaths were due to personal disputes rather than coalitionary aggression or “war.” This...
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Robert Bellah RIP
The sociologist and scholar of religion Robert Bellah has passed. He was a curious figure who leaves an ambiguous intellectual legacy. Before I explain, let me say that Bellah was, in my estimation,...
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Red “Religion”
While I don’t think that Vine Deloria’s God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973) does an especially good job of describing animist worldviews, Deloria clearly understood that these worldviews...
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