Religion and Food Seminar

I serve as chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Food seminar. Over its five year mission the seminar will produce an anthology of essays on the intersection of religion and food in the United States and Canada. We meet face-to-face at the AAR annual meeting in November, and work electronically during the rest of the year. You can find a very bare bones webpage for the seminar on the AAR’s webpage, at http://www.aarweb.org/Meetings/Annual_Meeting/Program_Units/PUCS/Website/main.asp?PUNum=AARPU181

Upcoming Monograph Projects

I have two new projects that I am developing over the coming years. The first is an in-depth study of the new religious movement known as Heaven’s Gate. (The group was never really called that during its 20+ year history, but that’s the name that we all know it by.) For this project I will be arguing that Heaven’s Gate functioned as a cultural barometer, revealing the many strands of American religious society that came together into this new religion. I’ve proposed the project to several funding agency and hope to get a fellowship in the coming year to focus on the writing. Stay tuned for some new articles and book chapters that I’ve written on Heaven’s Gate. I have three book chapters and articles on Heaven’s Gate in the pipeline.

I am also working on a second longer-term project, a study of the “religionization” of science among professional scientists and scientific popularizers. I am starting my study by examining how contemporary American physicists have sought to interrelate science and religion, and eventually want to include biologists, geneticists, and environmental scientists. I will include physical scientists for whom science is an “ultimate concern,” in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, scientists and popularizers who treat science as offering spiritual truths, and scientists who try to integrate their scientific and religious vocations. For an example of my musings on this subject, see my recent Global Spiral article, “Three Physicists on Religion: When Scientists See the Light.”