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.
Read MoreI spoke with Gregory Soden at The Classical Ideas podcast about Faking Liberties, what brought me to write the book, and how religious freedom works as an abstract ideal versus how it works in lived experience.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreSeveral weeks back after my Twitter thread on Kondō Marie exploded, I spoke with Tristan Grunow about the KonMari phenomenon and why I think people miss something important when they reduce her tidying method to her “Shintō roots” or describe it as “Shintō animism.”
Read MoreI woke up this morning in Japan to a tweet from my editor that Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan is now a physical object that exists out there in the world.
Photo credit: Kyle Wagner
Read MoreRecently I had the opportunity to sit down with Tristan Grunow of UBC to talk with him about religious responses to the Meiji political transition. In a conversation that hinges on the keyword anxiety, we talked about…
Read MoreMy latest teaser for Faking Liberties is now up over at Killing the Buddha. Timed to drop on the anniversary of the 21 February 1927 Farrington v. Tokushige Supreme Court decision, the essay ties religious discrimination against Japanese American Buddhists to the recent Supreme Court decision to deny a brief stay of execution to a Muslim prisoner in Dunn v. Ray.
Read MoreSecularity 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.
Read MoreThe last few weeks I’ve had a lot of engagement on Twitter with a thread I posted on January 17 about reactions to Kondō Marie’s hit show Tidying Up. I’m posting the thread below, and I’ve written up a longer piece that just went live at the Marginalia Review of Books.
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