Craig Martin

Brad Stoddard

Our culture is full of popular stereotypes about religion, both positive and negative. Many people uncritically assume that religion is intrinsically violent, or that religion makes people moral, or that it is simply "bullshit". This concise volume tackles 10 of these stereotypes, addresses why scholars of religion find them to be cliched, describes their origins, and explains the social or political work they rhetorically accomplish in the present. Cliches addressed include the following: - Religions are belief systems - I'm spiritual but not religious - Religion concerns the transcendent - Learning about religions leads to tolerance and understanding - Religion is a private matter. Written in an easy and accessible style, Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Cliches will be of interest to all readers looking to clear away unsophisticated assumptions in preparation for more critical studies.

Critiquing Clichés

Stereotyping Religion

A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religionintroduces the key concepts and theories from religious studies that are necessary for a full understanding of the complex relations between religion and society. The aim is to provide readers with an arsenal of critical concepts for studying religious ideologies, practices, and communities. This thoroughly revised second edition has been restructured to clearly emphasize key topics including: Essentialism Functionalism Authority Domination. All ideas and theories are clearly illustrated, with new and engaging examples and case studies throughout, making this the ideal textbook for students approaching the subject area for the first time.

A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion

Russell T. McCutcheon

Many regard religious experience as the essence of religion, arguing that narratives might be created and rituals invented but that these are always secondary to the original experience itself. However, the concept of "experience" has come under increasing fire from a range of critics and theorists. This Reader presents writings from both those who assume the existence and possible universality of religious experience and those who question the very rhetoric of "experience". Bringing together both classic and contemporary writings, the Reader showcases differing disciplinary approaches to the study of religious experience: philosophy, literary and cultural theory, history, psychology, anthropology; feminist theory; as well as writings from within religious studies. The essays are structured into pairs, with each essay separately introduced with information on its historical and intellectual context. The ultimate aim of the Reader is to enable students to explore religious experience as rhetoric created to authorize social identities. The book will be an invaluable introduction to the key ideas and approaches for students of Religion, as well as Sociology and Anthropology. CONTRIBUTORS: Robert Desjarlais, Diana Eck, William James, Craig Martin, Russell T. McCutcheon, Wayne Proudfoot, Robert Sharf, Ann Taves, Charles Taylor, Joachim Wach, Joan Wallach Scott, Raymond Williams

A Reader

Religious Experience

Talk of 'spirituality' and 'individual religion' is proliferating both in popular discourse and scholarly works. Increasingly people claim to be 'spiritual but not religious,' or to prefer 'individual religion' to 'organized religion.' Scholars have for decades noted the phenomenon - primarily within the middle class - of individuals picking and choosing elements from among various religious traditions, forming their own religion or spirituality for themselves. While the topics of 'spirituality' and 'individual religion' are regularly treated as self-evident by the media and even some scholars of religion, Capitalizing Religion provides one of the first critical analyses of the phenomenon, arguing that these recent forms of spirituality are in many cases linked to capitalist ideology and consumer practices. Examining cases such as Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, and Karen Berg's God Wears Lipstick, Craig Martin ultimately argues that so-called 'individual religion' is a religion of the status quo or, more critically, 'an opiate of the bourgeoisie.' Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and Opiate of the Bourgeoisie is a landmark publication in critical religious studies.

Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie

Capitalizing Religion

Craig Martin addresses the transgressive or deviant aspects of design: design that straddles the divide between the licit and illicit, the legal and illegal, in a variety of ways. Martin argues that design is not necessarily for the social good, but that it is immersed in the social realm in all its contradictions and confusions. Through a series of case studies he explores a wide range of social practices that employ illicit forms of design thinking, including: early computer hacking and present-day hacker culture in which everyday objects are repurposed and deliberately misused; the cultures of reproduction, counterfeit and pirated versions of classic and luxury designs; and the use of material practices by smugglers to conceal drugs within consumer goods and luggage. Deviant Design contends that these amateur and illicit practices challenge the normative idea of the professional designer or maker. Rather than being reliant on the services of institutionalized design professionals, the adhocist practitioner displays forms of innovative design knowledge in understanding how artefacts have an inherent potential to be misused or repurposed.

The Ad Hoc, the Illicit, the Controversial

Deviant Design

Craig Martin addresses the transgressive or deviant aspects of design: design that straddles the divide between the licit and illicit, the legal and illegal in a variety of ways. Martin argues that design is not necessarily for the social good; it is immersed in the social realm in all its contradictions and confusions. Through a series of case studies he explores a wide range of social practices that employ illicit forms of design thinking, including early computer hacking and present-day hacker culture in which everyday objects are repurposed and deliberately mis-used; reproduction, counterfeit, and pirated versions of classic and luxury designs, and the use of craft practices by smugglers to conceal drugs within consumer goods and luggage. Deviant Design and Illicit Innovation contends that these amateur and illicit practices challenge the normative idea of the professional designer or maker - rather than being reliant on the services of institutionalised design professionals, the adhocist consumer-or 'prosumer'-displays particular forms of innovative design knowledge in how artefacts have an inherent potential to be misused or repurposed.

Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, Craig Martin outlines a theory of discourse, ideology, and domination that can be used by scholars and students to understand these central elements in the study of culture. The book shows how discourses are used to construct social institutions-often classist, sexist, or racist-and that those social institutions always entail a distribution of resources and capital in ways that capacitate some subject positions over others. Such asymmetrical power relations are often obscured by ideologies that offer demonstrably false accounts of why those asymmetries exist or persist. The author provides a method of reading in order to bring matters into relief, and the last chapter provides a case study that applies his theory and method to racist ideologies in the United States, which systematically function to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with poor African Americans, thereby contributing to reinforcing the latter's place at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that has always existed in the US.

A Critique of the Study of Culture

Discourse and Ideology

The revised edition of this comprehensive fishing classic.

Fly Fishing in Northern New Mexico

Medieval theologians reconciled Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian dogma in a synthesis that dominated religious thought for centuries. This synthesis unraveled in the seventeenth century contemporaneously with the emergence of the new natural philosophies of the scientific revolution. Important figures of seventeenth-century thought strove to show that the medieval appropriation of Aristotle defied the historical record that pointed to an impious figure of dubious morality. - While numerous scholars have written on the seventeenth-century downfall of Aristotelianism, almost all of those works have examined how the conceptual content of the new sciences-such as the heliocentric cosmology, atomism, mechanical and mathematical models, and experimentalism-were used to dismiss the views of Aristotle. Subverting Aristotle is the first to focus on the religious polemics accompanying the scientific controversies that led to the eventual demise of Aristotelian natural philosophy.

Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science

Subverting Aristotle

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The shipping container is all around: whizzing by on the highway, trundling past on rails, unloading behind a big box store even as you shop there, clanking on the docks just out of sight.... 90% of the goods and materials that move around the globe do so in shipping containers. It is an absolutely ubiquitous object, even if most of us have no direct contact with it. But what is this thing? Where has it been, and where is it going? Craig Martin's book illuminates the “development of containerization”-including design history, standardization, aesthetics, and a surprising speculative discussion of the futurity of shipping containers. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Shipping Container

Craig Martin takes a careful look at how Renaissance scientists analyzed and interpreted rain, wind, and other natural phenomena like meteors and earthquakes and their impact on the great thinkers of the scientific revolution. Martin argues that meteorology was crucial to the transformation that took place in science during the early modern period. By examining the conceptual foundations of the subject, Martin links Aristotelian meteorology with the new natural philosophies of the seventeenth century. He argues that because meteorology involved conjecture and observation and forced attention to material and efficient causation, it paralleled developments in the natural philosophies of Descartes and other key figures of the scientific revolution. Although an inherently uncertain endeavor, forecasting the weather was an extremely useful component not just of scientific study, but also of politics, courtly life, and religious doctrine. Martin explores how natural philosophers of the time participated in political and religious controversies by debating the meanings, causes, and purposes of natural disasters and other weather phenomena. Through careful readings of an impressive range of texts, Martin situates the history of meteorology within the larger context of Renaissance and early modern science. The first study on Renaissance theories of weather in five decades, Renaissance Meteorology offers a novel understanding of traditional natural philosophy and its impact on the development of modern science.

Craig Martin

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