Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: Religion and the Corporate Form

After receiving generous feedback from several peer reviewers, our article, “Why Scholars of Religion Must Investigate the Corporate Form,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The article uses Japanese data to make a broader theoretical point about how examining corporations teaches us a great deal about religions as collective enterprises.

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Religious Freedom, Weapon of Choice

This transatlantic story of religious freedom makes America a star in the global drama of religious freedom. It suggests reassuring progress from Anglican religious oppression to American religious freedom. It also implicitly privileges whiteness. Recapitulating this story year after year places the origins of the United States in Europe rather than in the vast and diverse civilizations that predated Europeans’ arrival on the American continent. It also erases the abhorrent transoceanic passage of enslaved human beings like my African ancestors, who crossed the Atlantic as cargo in the holds of ships rather than as pilgrims in pursuit of freedom.

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Secularity is Anxious

Secularity is anxious

I wrote this short sentence during one of the many post-review revisions of my forthcoming book Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan. I didn’t think much of it when I wrote these three words, but I soon recognized that the sentence neatly encapsulated the main points of the book. I’ll use this post to unpack what I meant.

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