Author Archives: Dave Rohr

Reflecting on the Scientific Study of Religion After Nearly a Decade of Religion, Brain & Behavior

A decade ago, Religion, Brain & Behavior (RBB) was still a dream in the minds of its founding editors, neuroscientist Patrick McNamara, anthropologist Richard Sosis, and philosopher of religion Wesley J. Wildman. No journal dedicated to the cognitive, evolutionary, and neurological study of religion existed at the time, and the editorial team had considerable difficulty finding a publisher who would buy into the idea.[1] Eventually, Taylor and Francis agreed to publish RBB, and the first issue came out in April 2011, adorned then as today with William Blake’s “Web of Religion,” a painting that captures “the restless, promethean nature of religion,” in the words of RBB’s first editorial.[2] Today, out of 594 religious studies journals, RBB has the second highest CiteScore, a metric that ranks journals by the number of citations articles receive on average each year. With my curiosity piqued by this dramatic ascendancy, I asked to interview the current editors—Sosis, Wildman, philosopher and sociologist Joseph Bulbulia, and neuroscientist Uffe Schjoedt—about RBB and the scientific study of religion more generally.

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An Interview with Taylor Thomas about Naturalizing Grace

Taylor Thomas is a PhD student in theology, ethics, and philosophy at Boston University School of Theology and a Lindamood Fellow at the Center for Mind and Culture. Below is Dave Rohr’s interview with Taylor regarding her recent publication of “Hope in Imperfection: Toward a Naturalized Theology of Grace” in the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy.

Dave Rohr:

So my first question is, were you raised religious? And, if so, how did you come to be embrace philosophical naturalism?

Taylor Thomas:

I was raised Southern Baptist, as deeply Southern Baptist as you can get, with a little bit of Pentecostal and nondenominational holiness tossed in there every other Sunday. And then when I got to college, I did the normal take a few philosophy and religion courses and question everything, you know, God is dead, etc. And when I got to Boston University, I met up with Wesley Wildman and he introduced me to religious naturalism and I kinda felt at home there. Continue reading →

American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice

Recently published by SUNY Press, American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice explores the distinctive contribution to philosophical aesthetics made by the American philosophical tradition, including especially philosophical pragmatism and process philosophy. What follows is an abridged transcription, lightly edited to increase clarity, of David Rohr’s interviews with the volume’s editors, Walter Gulick and Gary Slater. An abridged video of the interviews can also be viewed below.

Dave Rohr:

So I’m here with Dr. Walter Gulick, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Montana State University, Billings, and we’re here to discuss this volume that just came out, American Aesthetics: Theory and Practice, which he edited with Gary Slater. So thank you so much for being here and being a part of this interview. I want to start with a very broad question. A lot of people who see this interview might not have any background for understanding what this book is all about. So, could you say a little bit about your understanding of philosophical aesthetics? What’s its purpose? How does it relate to art, art creation, and going to museums and whatnot?

Walter Gulick:

Well, the basic idea behind the book is that there’s a very rich tradition within American pragmatism primarily, and to some extent process thought, that has been overshadowed by a lot of recent, more analytic approaches to aesthetics. There’s a sense of reclaiming the importance of the American aesthetic tradition for a number of reasons. One is that it’s a very comprehensive kind of approach where it looks at aesthetics, not just narrowly as about beauty as is so often done, but sees it as embedded in perception as such, and particularly in perception as it becomes more clarified. So for me, notions like coherence, for instance, a very basic notion to philosophy and to argumentation is basically an aesthetic kind of evidence. It’s based on a feeling of completeness and comprehensiveness and so forth. And there are lots of ideas like that that I think are essentially aesthetic in their character that get set aside when aesthetics is looked at only as a study of the arts and so forth. Now this book, American Aesthetics, is primarily about how aesthetics relates to the arts, but not entirely. For instance, there are three essays by Thomas Leddy, David Strong, and Robert Corrington that looked at aesthetics as connected to how we live our lives. I love that kind of approach. But there are sections that are about theoretical approaches to aesthetics. So we had people like Wesley Wildman, for instance, Robert Neville or Randy [Auxier) or Nicholas Gaskill or Gary Slater who are setting forth a broader theoretical approach to aesthetics. But they’re also, and this I think is very important about the book, there’s also an emphasis upon how it’s all practice.

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