publications & digital scholarship

When Secularism Fails Women

Scott’s theoretical, historical narrative in Sex and Secularism takes its place in a wider conversation in which critical thinkers working in many genres—including film, music, and fiction—ponder gender, race, religion, and sexual difference in a way that refuses essentialism while taking seriously the political effects of these categories on people living in worlds of ongoing inequality and violence. Secularism is not the savior, nor is it the demon in this narrative; it is, like all political ideals, including feminism, a promise that variably incites and excludes.

This review of Joan Scott’s Sex and Secularism for Public Books can be found here. “When Secularism Fails Women.”

Epic Lives

When asked at a cosmic scale, the answer to the question “Is this all there is?” may often be yes. Measured by the secular—in the sense of very long duration—ages that predict the heat death of the universe, the prospects for eternal meaning look dim. Measured by the storytelling genius of George Eliot, Alice Munro, and Elena Ferrante, the answer is also a kind of yes. All that there is can be found right in front of you, in the people whom you encounter in your everyday lives, on the street, in a classroom, in your home. Human relationships are not the only force in the world for change, redemptive or evil. But they are, I hazard, required for our existence.

For the ten-year anniversary of The Immanent Frame, I shared a personal reflection on mothers, daughters, and books under the Is This All There Is? theme. It can be found here.

God Keep our Land: The Legal Ritual of the McKenna-McBride Commission, 1913–1916

A discussion of the testimonies of Indigenous peoples of the northwest coast during a governmental commission, in which they clearly spelled out their ongoing resistance to colonial rule, and to the Canadian myth of itself as a “resource-rich” nation in which the Indigenous people just needed to get out of the way.

“God Keep our Land: The Legal Ritual of the McKenna-McBride Commission, 1913–1916,” Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority, edited by Benjamin Berger and Richard Moon, London: Hart Publishing, pp. 79–93, 2016.

Narrating Religion through Museums

This article comes out of my course, Museums and Material Religion, in which we considered the significance of missionary provenance to so much of nineteenth and early-twentieth century museums collection, and how these collections are gaining new audiences in the twenty-first century who seek both to repatriate their “sacred objects” as well as to engage with museum collections in a ceremonial approach.

“Narrating Religion through Museums,” Narrating Religion, ed. Sarah Iles Johnston, MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbook, pp. 333–352, 2016.

Suppressing the Mad Elephant

Matt King, a scholar of Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism, asked me one day if I could help him to figure out the identity of a mysterious man from “Eng-a-leng” who appears in an account of an 1889 meeting between a Tibetan Lama and a Christian missionary as transcribed by a Mongolian monk in the early twentieth century. The results of our detective work can be found here, in History and Anthropology.

King, Matt, and Pamela Klassen. “Suppressing the Mad Elephant: Missionaries, Lamas, and the Mediation of Sacred Historiographies in the Tibetan Borderlands.” History and Anthropology 26, no. 5 (2015): 529–52.