New Books in Big Ideas

What brings us together as scholars in Religious Studies? Are the various social phenomena commonly grouped together as religion really that similar? The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (Oxford University Press, 2012) adds to this ongoing debate over whether ‘religion’ is a useful explanatory term. In general, issues of classification and the constructed nature of the category ‘religion’ are now a repeated themes in many scholars work. William Arnal, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Regina, and Russell T. McCutcheon, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, argue that we need to take our analysis even further and the common practice of historicizing the word ‘religion’ (or the habit of putting the word in quotation marks) generally fails to reveal the ordinariness of these social practices, and thus naturalizes the idea of the sacred. Ultimately, we need to stop employing ‘religion’ as an analytical category because it is a first-order folk classification derived from a particular historical setting. It is our job then to redescribe activity and explain the processes of social classification and identity construction. In our conversation we discuss definitions, Disney World, discursive products, theories of signification, genre,  the Cold War, secularism, estrangement, politics, Christian origins, being methodologically self-conscious, graduate study, the Toronto school of Religious Studies, and the relevance of our work’s minutiae in addressing larger educational and disciplinary objectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The continued growth of online gaming and virtual worlds has effects not only in the analog world, with games and social media organizations taking stock options public, but also in the worlds created online. Many games and platforms allow users to involve themselves in virtual labor, to own property, and most importantly to make purchases. This one of areas where the analog and virtual crossover. And the question for platform providers becomes how to capitalize on user interest while earning money. In the new book Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis (MIT 2014), Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, at the University of Oxford and Edward Castronova, professor of communications and cognitive science at Indiana University provide a detailed examination of the underpinnings and motivations for the creation of virtual economies. Lehdonvirta and Castronova consider various international examples to provide a comprehensive look at the markets that continue to be embedded into all kinds of online, and offline, interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

When we discuss the death penalty we usually ask two questions: 1) should the state be in the business of killing criminals?; and 2) if so, how should the state put their lives to an end? As Austin Sarat shows in his fascinating book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), these two questions are intimately related. The reason is pretty simple: if the state can’t find a legally and morally acceptable way to execute malefactors, then perhaps we need to ask seriously whether the state should be killing criminals at all. If the means cannot be found, then the end may well be unachievable. In Gruesome Spectacles, Sarat analyses hundreds of executions in an attempt to assess the degree to which we can kill criminals in legally and morally acceptable ways. What he discovers is that about three in a hundred American executions over the past century or so have gone badly wrong. Criminals who were supposed to have been put to death in a humane way were strangled, decapitated, set on fire, suffocated, and slowly poisoned. Apparently American authorities—however laudable their intentions—have found it quite difficult, practically speaking, to avoid “cruel and unusual punishment” when executing wrongdoers. It’s important to note that Gruesome Spectacles is not an anti-death penalty book. Sarat’s presentation of botched executions is balanced by consideration of the horrible crimes for which the ultimate penalty was imposed. What Sarat does–and we should thank him for it–is provide hard evidence on a crucial question: can we, realistically speaking, put criminals to death humanely? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Why do we feel guilty–and sometimes hurt ourselves–when we harm someone? Why do we become angry–and sometimes violent–when we see other people being harmed? Why do we forgive ourselves and others after a transgression even though “the rules” say we really shouldn’t? In his fascinating book The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Judge Morris B. Hoffman attempts to answer these questions with reference to evolutionary psychology. As a working judge, Hoffman is in an excellent position to explore the dynamics of our instincts to punish and forgive. We are, he says, evolved to punish “cheaters”–ourselves and others–so as to maintain all-important bonds of trust and cooperation. But we are also evolved not to take punishment too far. When correction becomes too costly, we forgive so as to maintain social solidarity. Listen in to our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The constitution guarantees Americans freedom of religious practice and freedom from government interference in the same same. But what does religious liberty mean in practice? Does it mean that the government must permit any religious practice, even one that’s nominally illegal? Clearly not. You can’t shoot someone even if God tells you to. Does it mean, then, that religious liberty is a sort of fiction and that the government can actually closely circumscribe religious practice? Clearly not. The government can’t ban a putatively religious practice just because it’s expedient to do so. So where’s the line? In God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, Second Edition, 2014), Marci A. Hamilton argues that it’s shifting rapidly. Traditionally, the government, congress, and courts agreed that though Americans should enjoy extensive religious freedom, that freedom did not include license to do anything the religious might like. A sensible accommodation between church and state had to be made so that both the church and state could do their important work. According to Hamilton, in  recent decades radical religious reformers have mounted a successful campaign to throw the idea of a sensible accommodation out the window. They have expanded the scope of religious liberty and thereby limited the ability of the government to protect citizens generally. In this sense, she says, religion–a force for great social good, in her mind–has been made into an instrument of harm for many Americans. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Climate change is in the news a lot today. There seems to be little doubt that it’s getting warmer and that, should present trends continue, the warming trend will have “historical” consequences. Things are going to change. Ever thus. As John L. Brooke shows in his remarkable Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge University Press, 2014), what we might colloquially call “the weather” has been nudging, pushing, and dramatically altering the course of World history for eons. Sometimes it’s dry; sometimes it’s wet. Sometimes it’s hot; sometimes it’s cold. Sometimes the air is good; sometimes it’s bad. There are patterns, as John points out, but there’s also a good degree of unpredictability–it is, after all, the weather. What’s happening right now, though, is not in the slightest unpredictable: if we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it’s going to get hot; if it gets hot, things are going to change–again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The “cloud” and “cloud computing” have been buzzwords over the past few years, with businesses and even governments praising the ability to save information remotely and access that information from anywhere. And an increasing number of organizations and individuals are using the cloud almost exclusively for their computing and storage purposes. The question remains, however, whether there is an actual understanding of what the cloud is, and the issues and implications that surround the growth in cloud storage and computing. In To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, Vincent Mosco, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queen’s University, where he was the Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society, describes the political, social, and cultural issues surrounding cloud computing. According to Mosco, “cloud computing serves as a prism that reflects and refracts every major issue in the field of information technology and society.” In To The Cloud, Mosco examines this prism and considers the historic, present day, and future implications of cloud computing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issues of privacy, harm prevention, and and cyberbullying. In her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (Yale UP, 2014), danah boyd, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Research Assistant Professor at NYU, and Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, demystifies teen use of social media for communication. In particular, boyd uses ethnographic interviewing and observation techniques to examine the how, what and why of youth use of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

The Oxford University Press series on digital politics has produced several new books that we have featured on the podcast. Interviews with Dave Karpf, Dan Kreiss, and Muzammil Hussain are available in previous podcasts. One of the latest from the series is Jennifer Stromer-Galley new book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (OUP 2014). Stromer-Galley is associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. This excellent new book is a bit of a walk down memory lane. Do you remember the early search features on Yahoo! and those slow loading webpages of the late 1990s? Stromer-Galley pieces together the use of the internet from 1996 through 2012. We learn about some of the ways the promise of the internet to democratize the presidential campaign process has largely failed. Presidential websites have nearly always sent information out, but rarely invited information back in. And even when they have, that information has never been as central to the campaign as often promised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas

Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is one of ideas. And that it is in the worst possible sense, for neither the Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in evidence. They don’t want the facts to get in the way of their arguments. In his remarkable book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Benjamin Radcliff provides facts that should help both Democrats and Republicans, despite their many differences, decide how to proceed. He asks a simple, compelling question: do conservative or liberal public policies make people happier? After an extensive and sophisticated analysis of the data, he reaches an equally simple, compelling answer: liberal policies do. Radcliff is a great friend of the free market; it is obvious, he says, that capitalism is the best economic system we have at our disposal. But he is also pragmatic: all the evidence shows that free markets alone don’t make people as happy as markets combined with robust welfare and labor-protection programs. There is a lesson here for both Democrats and Republicans. Listen up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/big-ideas