Sónia Silva is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Skidmore College. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia, as well as museum work in Europe and the USA, Silva’s research deals with materiality, material religion, the notion of the fetish, ritual and religion, divination, witchcraft, violence, and museums. Silva is the author of Alon…[Read more]

The internet has changed the ways human beings connect and understand one another. Through the use of social media, people find themselves immersed in a digital environment consisting of various practices and behaviors. As Christianity continues to negotiate the often tricky relationship it has with digital experience, what philosophical and…[Read more]

Clark Ashton Smith—unlike the more famous H.P. Lovecraft—engaged with the medieval as a setting for his fiction. Lovecraft admired classical Roman civilization and the eighteenth century, but had little time for medieval themes. As Brantley Bryant has related, Lovecraft wrote contemptuously that the Middle Ages was a period that “snivel[ed] along…[Read more]

Previous work on inter-ethnic coexistence in Mauritius has portrayed secularism as the only possible site of the national, which is at the same time described as clearly separated from religious traditions. In contrast, focusing on understandings of secularism among Mauritian Muslims in the context of a politics of diasporic ‘ancestral c…[Read more]

This essay uses Arnaldo Momigliano’s genealogy of antiquarianism and historiography to propose a new method for engaging the past. The Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987) traced antiquarianism from its advent in ancient Greece and later growth in Rome to its early modern efflorescence, its usurpation by history, and its transformation…[Read more]

A family tale inspired the author to explore seemingly minor, but related details of the Saint-Domingue, French, and American Revolutions, including the population movements to and from the United States. “A Haitian Tale of Diasporas and Revolutions” is a documented historical and personal narrative through cultures and continents, as…[Read more]

This photoessay documents the 82nd Annual Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival, which took place in Morgan City, Louisiana over Labor Day weekend in 2018. It contains photographs of the festival, including images of pageant queens, food vendors, and the Blessing of the Fleet. The essay documents the authors’ experience of the festival, and c…[Read more]

This is one of a series of film reviews of Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler.

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[Read more]

This article explores the interface of multiple legal systems in early modern Daghestan. By comparing colonial engagements with legal plurality with indigenous genres of Daghestani legal discourse, I aim to shed light on the plurality of legal systems that preceded as well as informed legal discourse under colonialism. The Daghestani turn to…[Read more]

An essay on why foot washing (washing of the saints’ feet) should remain a valuable practice for Original Free Will Baptists and Christianity. In this essay, I explore the ministerial implications foot washing has for identity formation, tradition, and community building. I suggest that foot washing is a visible and physical reminder of what our…[Read more]

An exploration of the rhythms and relationships that come from theological conversation. This paper explores the necessity of relationship and connection when doing theology. I argue that theology must be relational beginning with a theological encounter with the other. This paper incorporates the thoughts of Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Luc Nancy, and…[Read more]

This paper takes a new approach to the contentious area of the etymology of Metatron, applying the lessons learnt from biblical folk-etymologies which have been shown to actively influence the writing of narratives. In the first section one such possible folk-etymology is proposed, based around the sequence TTR as a Divine Name in Metatron, along…[Read more]

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an…[Read more]

The attempts of Mordecai Kaplan and Ludwig Wittgenstein at reforming Jewish theology and analytic philosophy respectively share some important traits. While Kaplan’s scientifically respectable “atheistic” Judaism sought to reinterpret theological principles in line with a modern-day materialist vision of the cosmos, Wittgenstein’s reducti…[Read more]

In this article I make a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to…[Read more]

Literary and historical analysis of the passage at Num 9:1–14

Presents a new compositional history of the centralization law.

In this essay I sketch an outline of how the book of Isaiah presents its politics, working from the assumption—based on the research of Peter Ackroyd and others—that the presentation of Isaiah, the prophet, in the book’s opening chapters is key. I end up arguing that the book advocates for Davidic politics, as others have claimed, but that its d…[Read more]