Empty Voices

The Conservative party has won a landslide victory. In many ways, this was predictable. Unfortunately, my strong desire for a Labour government clouded my judgement, so I will admit I was surprised to see Johnson win so big. There is already plenty of analysis going on. Many are now questioning the decision to come out in favour of a second referendum, which I now agree was probably a mistake. The commentary from the so-called centrists is, as you would expect, terrible – so there no need to detail it here; it is best ignored. Put simply, there were three main issues which help explain why Labour lost and lost so badly: Corbyn; Brexit; and policy. First, Corbyn is a controversial politician, and controversial politicians only have a limited amount of political capital – especially when the mainstream media is desperate to strip it from you. In simple terms, Corbyn was past his sell-by-date by the time of the 2019 election. Really, after the anti-Semitism controversy, and as t...

If one asks why studying religion matters, one is increasingly likely to hear the response that studying religion matters because classification matters. But what does this mean? The importance of classification is one mainly of consequence – a consequence which derives from the fact that the act of classification is not neutral. For some, this point may seem counterintuitive - this is especially the case if one’s understanding of classification is primarily based on how classification supposedly works in the natural sciences, which seems to be an impeccable objective discipline. However, a closer look demonstrates the act of classification to be subjective, context-dependent and ideological. To illustrate the point that classification is not value-free, we can look at the  Seinfeld  – 90s sitcom –   episode, ‘The Soup’. In the episode, Kenny Bania, a character who throughout the show wishes to be friends with Jerry Seinfeld, who does not harbour similar ambitions, ...

In September 2018, the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) published their final report, Religion and Worldviews: The Way Forward . I am late to read this report and have thus missed the initial discussion it has generated. Following the Welsh government’s recent adoption of key aspects of the report's recommendations, however, I wish to make a few, hopefully constructive, comments. Specifically, I wish to focus my remarks on those proposals aimed at renaming RE and repurposing RE. Troubling ‘Worldviews’ At the heart of CoRE’s report is the suggestion to change the name of ‘Religious Education’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. This proposal has generated considerable debate; a fact which is not surprising considering the decades-long prevalence of definitional questions in the academic Study of Religion. Indeed, questions around definition have been picking up at a critical, postmodern pace since the 90s onwards, further intensifying discussions (McCutcheon, 1997; Fi...

Gainesville Recovery City   An Interview with Professor Trysh Travis at the University of Florida Liam Metcalf-White   In June this year I travelled to the city of Gainesville, Florida, to carry out a small qualitative research project on religion, sexuality, and addiction recovery. The study was entitled  Examining Discourses of Religion and Secular among LGBT+ Men with Experiences of Addiction Recovery in Gainesville, Florida. During my time in Florida,  I had the privilege of interviewing Professor Trysh Travis at the Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women's Studies Research at the University of Florida.  She is internationally the best-known feminist cultural historian of the Recovery Movement. Can you talk me through the importance of examining addiction and recovery using the prisms of gender and sexuality? I part company with the 12-Step belief that gendered and sexualized oppression is an “outside issue.” We live in a culture cha...

In the 2015 general election, the Green Party represented the progressive left. While Ed Miliband was buckling under the pressure from his right-wing colleagues, the Green’s unapologetically championed public ownership, fairer taxes and more. Sadly, in 2019, the situation is rather different. Today the Green Party talks less about public ownership and instead is spending most of its time using, together with the Liberal Democrats, a Brexit stick to bash Jeremy Corbyn and Labour – a leader and party that is, more than ever before, in tune with Green Party values.   Of course, the Green Party is free to criticise Labour, and just because they do so doesn’t mean they’re no longer progressives – Labour still holds regressive positions which deserve to be pointed out, e.g. its conservative approach to drug reform. Moreover, campaigning heavily to revoke the 2016 referendum isn’t itself anti-progressive, especially considering the no-deal Brexit we’re potentially facing. ...

Jo Swinson has beaten Ed Davey to become the leader of the Liberal Democrats. How will she fair? Will she continue the Liberal Democrat revival? Can she become, as she believes she can, the next Prime Minister? History and contemporary political opinion suggests not.  The Liberal Democrats were born from the unification of the old Liberal and Social Democratic Parties in 1989, t hough   the two parties continued to live on as the Liberal Democrats developed a left and right-wing. Indeed, despite the Liberal Democrats reduction in size, these two wings still exist today. The right-wing – represented by the old Liberal cohort – are Classical Liberals, which, in simple terms, mean they are as right-wing as the Tories economically, but are more tolerant to minority groups and open to equality legislation, etc. The left-wing – represented by the old Social Democrats – believe in a weak form of social democracy – allowing the state to redistribute some wealth, play a lea...

Abstract In its current state, the Study of Religion operates as an unstable and confused field in which, quite often, no differential is made between critical and confessional approaches. Drawing on collaborative work with other doctoral colleagues, we hold that a new Study of Religion is modelled from Critical Religion, adopting an anti-realist ontological framework which does not assume that our object of study exists ‘out-there’. Instead, ‘religion’ should be conceived of as a social construct, a product of language, particular histories, and intertwining relations of knowledge and power. Following this, we hold that discourse analysis is taken up as the primary methodological framework used by academics of religion. Doing so, we enter into the debate regarding the nature and position of the Study of Religion as a separate academic endeavour from that of other social and human sciences. Introduction This paper is the result of inquiries into the status of Re...