Here are some of the more or less academic papers about religion that I’ve written in recent years, in .pdf format. Please feel free to read them and respond to them, but they should not be quoted from or referenced without permission. They are works in the progress of an education and generally don’t represent the cutting edge research. They also have typos.

What Happens To Religion When It Is Biologized?
My master’s thesis of U.C. Santa Barbara, which explores the motivations and ideologies behind recent work in cognitive science, neurology, and evolutionary biology of religion. January 2008.

Being-in-Nature and the Question of Love
By exploring the accounts that Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt give of Augustine on love, human, and nature, argues that they phrase human nature, and by extension love, in the form of a question. December 2007.

New Order and New Manhood:
Gandhi and Bin Laden against the Great Powers
Delivered at the 2007 American Academy of Religion’s Men’s Studies Group, it juxtaposes the local lives of Gandhi and Osama bin Laden in order to examine constructions of masculinity and explore questions in biographical method. Slideshow. November 2007.

A Necessary Ideology:
Politics, Pedagogy, and the Study of Religion
Begins with emerging arguments that the study of religion is an inherently ideological project. Rather than trying to sidestep that ideology through complicated, philosophically neutral methodologies, argues that the ideological origins and work of religious studies are unavoidable and should be embraced, albeit responsibly. June 2007.

Horace Bushnell’s Sense of American Theology (in Its Diversity) as an Interpretive Order
Attempts to deal with the problem of interpretation suggested by the 19th century American theologian Horce Bushnell’s influential theory of language through a reading of his sense of the social order as an organism. June 2007.

Explanation in Reivew
A series of webpages summarizing the reviews of some recent work in the scientific study of religion, along with recommendations with how to procede in the dialog among religious studies scholars. June 2007.

Hegel’s Proof and the Experience of God
Through his ingenious synthesis of the three classic proofs for God into a single proof, this paper argues, Hegel sets out a theory of religious experience that insists on rationality and comprehensibility. March 2007.

Neoliberal Political Economy and the Religious Revival
Starting from a remark in a lecture by Tariq Ali, argues that the rise of politicized religion in recent decades is related to the rise of globalized, neoliberal economics. March 2007.

Directions and Reference Points in Recent Comparative Religion
By comparing these two diverging movements in comparative religion and probing their antecedents, attempts to imagine a meeting point between scientific and postmodern approaches to scholarship. December 2006.

Searching for the Legitimate Secular:
Lowith, Blumenberg, Asad
Reading the dispute about modernity between German philosophers Karl Lowith and Hans Blumenburg in terms of Talal Asad, calls into question any attempt to establish a definitive narrative and justification for the secular. December 2006.

Proving What We See with the Eyes of Love:
A Demonstration on the Existence of God
Theological piece offering a demonstrative proof of the experience of the existence of God, depending in particular on Anselm’s ontological proof. July-August 2006.

The Cosmogonic Theater:
Public Performance in the Evolution Controversies
Senior thesis on performance, religion in the public square, and the evolution controversies in the United States. May 2006.

Enacting Orthodoxy in Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults
Discussion of the production of difference in a classic American evangelical manual on countercult evangelism. May 2006.

The Spectator and the Fool:
Watching and Learning with Symeon of Emesa
Reading an ancient Christian text in dialog with a modern Christian theologian, explores the notion of the holy person as performer. December 2005. April 2007 revision.

Flescher’s Saints in Dialogue:
Sketching an Idea of Aesthetic Theology
Begins with a reading of Flescher’s Heroes, Saints, and Ordinary Morality, proposes a general scheme for thinking about religious traditions from a secular perspective. December 2005.

Theology of the Body, Theology of the Word
For me, a major rereading of Athanasius of Alexandria and his relationship to the ascetic movement, particularly St. Antony of the Desert. Suggests that in the monks’ embodied discourse, Athanasius saw the edenic possibility of the end of theology. October 2005.

Justification and the Health of the Nation:
Religious and Secular Language in the NAE’s “Call to Civic Responsibility”
Analyzes the dialogic use of secular and religious justification in a position document by the National Association of Evangelicals. May 2005.

The Sultan and the Gauntlet of Fire:
A Study in Early Franciscan Missionary Texts
Tracing the telling of the story of St. Francis’s journey to the Sultan of Egypt from his time until ours, demonstrates the variation in its uses toward the ends of particular authors. May 2005.

After the Mythology of the Primitive
Noting the debilitating criticism of the ethnography and assumptions supporting religious studies’s foundational texts, attempts to reconstruct a responsible reading of them for the present. December 2004.