Took the cats out for a walk with my brother and accidentally created a 90s Britpop album cover

Replies hidden w/o consent, allow for bullying and swarming (w/ follower hacking) w/o any capacity to understand that it is happening. This "feature" allows the ugly behavior left on twitter to surface here w/ the "advantage" of the target unable to know that their posts are being hijacked by trolls

My virtual Halloween costume, "the Mad Social Scientist" is my annual homage to Professor Melvin Fenwick (and Gary Larson)

I've spent the last year working with an incredible group of people. Training them in how to undertake oral history interviews to gather local stories before they are gone. Together we've made a documentary being screened locally, for free, on 3rd Nov. www.alloaadvertiser.com/news/2557664...

Join us tomorrow for a discussion on religion, race, and doing public facing scholarship in these fascist times.

I am convening the Religious Studies panel, the call for which can be found here: www.isrlc.org/religious-st...

The CFP for the 2026 meeting of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture (Stirling, UK, 10-13 September) is now live. Abstracts of no more than 350 words due 31 January. www.isrlc.org/isrlc-confer...

This 👇 💯

“Free access to information is a pillar that upholds the edifice of our societies...we are called to defend and guarantee it” “Current events call for particular discernment and responsibility, and it is clear that the media has a crucial role in forming consciences and helping critical thinking”

Please note: 🧵

This is also a geographically transplanted, verbatim white Christian nationalist talking point, used in the U.S. for decades. See @candidamoss.bsky.social's work on the white Christian nationalist rhetorical strategy of self-identification as victims and martyrs

Also exceedingly rare for a court to cite Schragger, Schwartzman, and Tebbe, but lo and behold.

For more on this, read 1) @kevinmkruse.bsky.social One Nation Under God www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kevin... 2) @kellyjbaker.bsky.social Gospel According to the Klan kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700624478/ White Collar Supremacy www.kellyjbaker.com/writing/whit...

Chicago, Boston, Baltimore, DC, & L.A. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLkP...

Its particularly & grotesquely offensive that Brooks cites this white Christian Nationalist fascist of a sociologist of religion, to claim social scientists do not study culture.

Church doesn't belong in air quotes. Christian Missionary Colonialism committed variations on these acts openly & globally. The indictment said Taylor believed that "if an individual fails to obey his orders and commands, they are defying God and will suffer in Hell" www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Nail on the fucking head.

Another heartbreaking story about a young person who confided in ChatGPT before committing suicide, sensitively reported by @kashhill.bsky.social. It has led to the first known case to be brought against OpenAI for wrongful death. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/t...

"There aren’t separate words for famine and starvation in Irish: an gorta covers both. To the English-speakers shaping colonial policy, it was important to have one word implying intent and another evading it." www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/au...

On Saturday, August 16, hundreds of Latinx punks gathered at MacArthur Park for an evening of anti-authoritarian cumbia and hardcore ska punk as one of the venue’s 10 free summer concerts. By @jwhendricks.bsky.social Full story: lataco.com/ska-punk-mac...

Reestablishing Religion was selected for this series because it is enormously to useful researchers, teachers or journalists covering religion in the US, white Christian Nationalism, religion & law, or religion & nationalist/authoritarian movements in other parts of the world. Join us.

Good morning to everyone in the UK who is either protesting the Couch fetishist, or refusing to cooperate with any of the invasive nonsense done in the name of accommodating his security.

**previously** a world class institution. I'm not the parent of a current or entering undergraduate student, but I'd be considering suing for fraud, with this bit of bait and switch.

Monday 18 Aug 2025 10:00-11:30 AM CST | -6 UTC "Reestablishing Religion" A Conversation w/ @richschragger.bsky.social @micahschwartzman.bsky.social & @nelsontebbe.bsky.social Religion, Authoritarianism & Public Narratives prt 4 Article lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv... Register soraaad.org

It's HERE! It arrived! Magic and Heresy in Ancient Christian Literature by @vox-magica.bsky.social arrived today!

I just got an email informing me that my Annual Review on structural racism with @tyson-brown.bsky.social and @pahoman.bsky.social is open access. So, download away.

Join us in signing and sharing this petition to prevent layoffs of over 400 people (both academic & professional services staff) at Lancaster University. We are all at risk and it's a scary time.

According to the memo, "workers may engage in “attempting to persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views” as long as “such efforts are not harassing in nature”. This clears the way for Federal Government offices to serve as mission fields. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/...

The Japanese Journal of Religious Studies @jjrs-nirc.bsky.social ✨50th anniv issue✨ abt past, present, & future of 🇯🇵 religious studies is out! 🙏Paul Swanson, Hayashi Makoto, Kawahashi Noriko, Keller Kimbrough, Emi Foulk Bushelle, @orionklautau.bsky.social @jolyonbt.bsky.social @aikerots.bsky.social

Table of Contents:

Offered without comment, or a paywall Religion in the U.S. www.yahoo.com/news/article...

RIP to AAR/SBL

For those of you attending academic conferences in the U.S., after October 1, 2025 please note the following:

VIRTUAL MEET UP 8 July 12 PM CST (-6 UTC) ​Whether you're a designer, PM, DevOps, or just AI-curious Rendezvoux's AI Club is an open space to talk about how AI fits into our daily professional lives This isn’t a panel It’s not a lecture It’s a conversation led by Mila Shumilina lu.ma/m31keoub

Pioneering project releases more lost Irish records spanning 700 years

In honour of Joy Division's iconic album Unknown Pleasures being released on this day in 1979, I'm again sharing one of my favourite ever video clips (Peanuts vs Joy Division dance party)...

So, this isn't your fault, but this is a specious fucking argument that offends me to my core. The people who can earn more in industry and choose to teach on the side make up a FRACTION of the adjunct population and are generally not the subject of the very serious problems of adjunctification.

This is really interesting technology with a lot of cool potential that's actually being slowly and thoughtfully tested for safety. I do worry, however, that it could further reify social attitudes about nonspeaking people, with the expectation that if you can't voice, you should get this implant.

Throwing a Hail Mary here… I know this is a long shot but, has anyone got a copy/photos of this? I’m an (American) independent researcher & need it for a research project. #AcademicSky #Sociology

Our first panel for #IR47 is opened by Octavio Carrasco, who is presenting on "Money and Moral Injury: the Implicit Religion of Squid Game." He is exploring the implicit religion of money as an image and also the system of capitalism as a form of implicit religion using Squid Game as an example.

Amanda Furiasse on "Beyond Prediction: Al, Religious Ethics, and the Urban Imagination." Exploring how AI & urban planning often reflect extensive effects where efficiency, control & prediction are valued more than creativity and ethics. #IRUS

Up next for #IRUS we have George Gonzales and @drfstewart.bsky.social delivering a workshop on how to network, focusing on personal approaches to networks, being effective without exhausting yourself, networking as an introvert, UK / US differences and how to recover from networking.

The extensive effects framework is an elegant way to reveal the interconnected nature of human experiences & their far reaching impacts on social structures & systems of power. But, there's significant challenges in establishing clear causal links in a phenomena & their extensive effects. #IR47

That's why it's only white people who tell Black people to stop living in the past / get over slavery, as if the tendrils of slavery don't reach into the present. For many whites they don't, because we've created the discipline of history in such a way that we don't have to see the tendrils. #IR47

The history of Blackness in America is the history of the right to exist alongside everyone else in the future. For Black America, past, present & future continually exist at the same time. #IR47

Humans continuously seek new ways of finding meaning, understanding the world, & making commitments. These things in turn take on lives of their own and shape the world we live in, in our collective futures. Which is a really threatening prospect if we let them remain unconscious and unnamed. #IR47

History, Society & culture are constructions that continually evolve, adapt, & renegotiate themselves, especially as we name them. Bailey's concept of implicit religion suggests that the search for meaning in life is not at the hinge of post/modernism. Nor is it dictated by religion. #IR47

West Africa had brought the slave trade to a standstill, and the fanatical British naval captain Challoner Ogle tasked with their eradication to preserve the trade. #IR47 www.prometheusbooks.com/978163388844...

@drangelasutton.bsky.social book is about the 1722 Battle of Cape Lopez off the coast of Gabon in West Africa. The culmination of a years long cat & mouse chase between the fleet of Golden Age pirates whose marauding in