It’s the holiday season and if nothing else, the message we’re all supposed to be embracing is something along the lines of peace and goodwill towards all people. It’s a nice sentiment, of course, but one we generally don’t spend too much time attempting to live up to the rest of the year. But why…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: Why We Can’t Just All Get Along
Category: Countdown to Midnight
Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Chosen One and You
We live in rude times. But for those of use in the United States, an oppressive wave of individualism (culminating in the persona of Donald Trump) has been riding out our cultural commentary and news media for the past several years. Oppressive Individualism is nothing new to the West, however. It’s cropped up before in…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Chosen One and You
Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Bad Cultural Appropriation Penny
It’s an old post from Tumblr, but it just keeps turning back up in my social media feeds. Kind of like cultural appropriation. Yes, I’m going to talk about cultural appropriation here but let me actually start at the bottom of this post. We’ll work our way up from there. There’s one aspect of…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Bad Cultural Appropriation Penny
Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Universal Subordination of Women
Within academic Feminist theory there lies a deeply troubling question: Why are women universally subordinated? Of course, the nature of this question in many ways presupposes the kinds of answers we should expect. However, while this does not completely devalue either the question or the analysis, we should evaluate the principal premise because it is…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: The Universal Subordination of Women
Anthro Mini-Lecture: Religion and Violence (By way of the Crusades)
The Crusades are one of the most commonly cited examples of religious conflict. Even today, the Crusades still metaphorically stand in for any number of religiously-tinged battles, conversion endeavors, or various other political fall-out (I’m looking at you CNN). They are also often held up as evidence of the latent violence existing within religion itself…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: Religion and Violence (By way of the Crusades)
Anthro Mini-Lecture: Can Religion and Science Coexist?
In his book, Faith Versus Fact (Penguin Books, 2015), evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne seeks to tackle a problem the modern Western world has been struggling with for several decades now: Can Science and Religion coexist? For those of you who don’t feel like reading all of the below, the answer is ‘yes’ but it largely…Continue reading Anthro Mini-Lecture: Can Religion and Science Coexist?
Welcome to the Apocalypse!
Religion is a complicated subject. And contrary to what appears to be popular belief, Religion (with a capital “R”) is not some abstract floating ideal somewhere out there for us to volley back and forth over our respective fences. Rather, as a cultural system, it infiltrates every aspect of our lives; including politics, economics, art…Continue reading Welcome to the Apocalypse!