Academic papers
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conference presentations | academic papers | work-in-progress
Selected Conference Presentations
| "Cult Apology: A Modest (Typological) Proposal" | Society for the Scientific Study of Religion 2002 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, UT |
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"Reflections on Lousiville: The Countercult in Conversation" For those who are interested, you can also read the Portuguese version of this essay, "Reflexões em Louisville: Movimento Cristão Apologético em Conversação." |
2002 Annual Meeting of CESNUR, Salt Lake City, UT |
| "Apologia and Academia: Prospects for a Rapprochement?" | Evangelical Ministries to New Religions 2002 Annual Conference, Lousiville, KY |
| "From Parchment to Pixels: The Christian Countercult on the Internet" | 2001 Annual Meeting of CESNUR, London, England; or click here. |
With the permission of the editors and as I get them formatted for the Web, I will be posting previously published articles.
| Hacker Religion: Open and Closed Religious Systems on the Internet |
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| "For the Bible tells me so": Countercult Epistemology and the Logic of Biblical Apologetics |
This essay expands on a comment I made at both the EMNR and CESNUR conferences in 2002 on the circular reasoning by which much of countercult apologetics is informed. |
| Countercult Colonialism: The Christian Countercult as Orientalist Discourse |
This essay uses the analytic lens articulated by Edward W. Said known as "orientalism" to examine the social construction of new and alternative religious movements as the exotic (and, by implication, dangerous) Other by the Christian countercult. Rephrasing slightly one of Said's definitions of "orientalism," countercult discourse is an evangelical mechanism "for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over" popular conceptualizations of these new and alternative religious movements. |
| Newsweek's Islam: A Quarter-Century Review | In "Iran," Edward Said (1980) painted the portrait of Islam that we have become accustomed to seeing in North American mainstream media: an unrelentingly negative picture, simplified and simplistic, rendered in a Manichaean palette stripped of all colours and left with only black and white. It could be argued that said chose only those examples of news coverage that suited his interpretive agenda and ignored those that challenged it. Indeed, that precise point was argued in two rebuttal pieces in the Columbia Journalism Review, where Said's article first appeared. How, though, has Islam fared in the nearly twenty-five years since Said's essay was published? |
| Out of the Blue: 9/11, Media Decontextualization, and the Illusion of Uniqueness |
Usually events of tragic import are located by the media in the context of similar events; in addition to other considerations, this location serves as a mechanism by which the nature of these events may be rapidly contextualized for and, therefore, understood by the target audience. Often, though not always, over time these contextualizations take the form of a narrative stream that functions in a number of ways. In the case of the september 11 attacks, this contextualization has manifestly not happened, and the resulting illusion of uniqueness has served to support the Bush administration's putative "war on terror." |
| Toward a Revised Sociology of the Occult | At a recent conference, J. Gordon Melton pointed out that the occult community in North America is among the most under-studied of religious phenomena. Yet, that community remains one of the most deeply entrenched aspects of the American religious landscape. By this, Melton did not mean the various Neopaganisms which have attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years, but rather Western occult traditions such as Hermeticism, ritual lodge magick, and Freemasonry— what I will call below an aspect of the "social occult." It is not the case that these have been ignored entirely. Recent attempts to typologize the occult, however, have blurred the boundaries that separate Neopaganism from the Western occult traditions, and often simply rendered the latter a more obscure, impenetrable version of the former. |
| A Very Messy Cartography: Omnipraxy and Multilinearity in the Evolution of Modern Neopaganism |
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| In Search of a Neopagan Past: Does History Matter? | |
| The Algorithmic Oracle: Online Divination in (surpringly enough) Cross-Cultural Perspective |
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| "Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live": Countercult Constructions of Modern Neopaganism |
This essay discusses the sources (both explicit and implicit) upon which elements of the evangelical Protestant countercult draw in their construction of modern Neopaganism as a proselytic Other, and the effects of this construction on perceptions of religious freedom within fundamentalist elements of the Christian Right. |
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Ritual, Belief, and Neopagan Omnipraxy: |
©
2003
Douglas E. Cowan