Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Emile Durkheim was a foundational figure in the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, yet recapitulations of his work sometimes overlook his most intriguing ideas, ideas which continue to have contemporary resonance. Here, I am going to discuss two such ideas from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (originally published in 1912 and then in English in 1915), his concept of energy and contagion.
After the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia on 12 August, 2017, the people of the United States waited anxiously for a response from their president. Sure enough, the first response came that day, denunciatory but equivocal. He condemned the violence coming from “many sides,” a response many found dissatisfactory considering that it was not counterprotesters but the alt-right who were responsible.
However, a parallel and equally disturbing trend is happening ecologically in the US, with the rejection of climate change science and the withdrawal from the Paris Accord. Though climate change may at first appear to be a separate issue from the xenophobia and anti-refugee mindset, they are more inextricably tied to one another than we are led to believe.
Every few months brings news about the Confederate flag or Confederate monuments, and their legitimate or illegitimate place in American culture.
The attention given to each “unpresidential”tweet by US President Donald Trump illustrates the political power of Twitter. Policymakers and analysts continue to raise numerous concerns about the potential political fall-out of Trump’s prolific tweeting. Six months after the inauguration, such apprehensions have become amplified. Take for instance Trump’s tweet in March 2017 that “North Korea is behaving very badly.
Overpromising was a central feature of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. He was going to build a big, beautiful wall and make the Mexicans pay for it. He was going to unleash a secret plan to defeat ISIS. And he was going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something really terrific. Unfortunately, Donald Trump and the Republicans aren’t the only ones making unrealistic promises.
In 1975, the English author John Berger wrote about the political implications of immigration, at a time when one in seven workers in the factories of Germany and Britain was a male migrant – what Berger called the ‘seventh man’. Today, every seventh person in the world is a migrant. Migrants are likely to settle in cities.
Who are the Rohingya and what is exactly happening to them right now? Since August over 420,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar, citing human rights abuses and seeking refuge in Bangladesh. Sarah Seniuk and Abby Kulisz interview Michael Jerryson, a scholar who works on Buddhist-Muslim relations in Southeast Asia, in order to learn more about the background to this current crisis.
Maps convey simple historical narratives very clearly–but how useful are simple stories about the past? Many history textbooks and studies of the Reformation include some sort of map that claims to depict Europe’s religious divisions in the sixteenth century.
In the 1990s a rash of school shootings changed the landscape of American childhood. Research eventually revealed that they all had one characteristic in common: the shooters had all been victims of bullying. Suddenly, bullying, an activity that had been more or less ignored for centuries, or praised as a way of toughening up the next generation, took the spotlight as a source of personal misery and potential public menace.
he Committee on Appropriations of the US House of Representatives, in a so-called rider to the pending federal budget bill, has proposed significant procedural restrictions on the IRS’s ability to enforce the Johnson Amendment. The Johnson Amendment is the provision of the Internal Revenue Code which prevents all tax-exempt institutions (including churches) from participating in political campaigns.
Despite differences in historical era and social background, the Kaiser who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918 and the American president who parlayed a real-estate empire into electoral (if not popular) victory displayed remarkably similar temperament. As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen suggested, “Germany used to have a leader like Trump,” adding that “it’s not who you think.”
In Love, Madness, and Scandal, author Johanna Luthman chronicles the life of Frances Coke Villiers, Viscountess of Purbeck. Forced by her father into marrying Sir John Villiers; the elder brother of royal favorite, the Duke of Buckingham; Frances then fell for another man, Sir Robert Howard. While her husband succumbed to mental illness, she gave birth to Robert’s child.
Over five years ago, a colleague and I began a conversation that eventually led to the development of the Smart Decarceration Initiative. The aim of this initiative is to advance policy and practice innovations in order to substantially reduce incarceration rates, while simultaneously addressing racial and behavioral health disparities in the criminal justice system and maximizing public safety and well-being.
With sea level rising and ice caps rapidly melting, the danger signs of global warming are evident, increasing the need to be environmentally friendly. However, much of this focus is on being environmentally friendly at home. Many of us spend a large proportion of our time at work, making it just as crucial to be ‘green’ at work, as we are at home.
Secularism is under threat. From Turkey to USA, India to Russia, parts of Europe and the Middle East, secularism is being attacked from all sides: from the left, from the right, by liberal multiculturalists and illiberal totalitarians, abused by racists and xenophobes as a stick with which to beat minorities in diverse societies, subverted by religious fundamentalists planning its destruction.