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Associate Professor of Religion
Departmental Area: Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy Address: Department of Religion
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Background
Matthew Day (Ph.D., Brown 2003).
There is a rule-of-thumb among sailors: only step up into your lifeboat. That is to say, one should never abandon ship unless she is sinking beneath your feet.
The first decade of my professional life was spent chipping away at two blocks of scholarship. At one level, I was interested in the various links that have connected naturalistic and medical theorizing about religion with the ambition to preserve a modern civic order. At another, I was committed to championing what might be called a “critical turn” in the academic study of religion. I even cared enough about the field to serve as the Editor of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion for a little while.
All of that changed around 2011, when I climbed up and into my lifeboat. My teaching and research is now—and will continue to be in the foreseeable future—more engaged with the history of capitalism, or the associated fields of maritime history and international political economy, than with “religious studies.”
I spend every possible minute messing about in one of my sailboats.
Recent Graduate Seminars
- Marx, Weber, Bourdieu
- The Landscapes of American Capitalism
Recent Cources
Spring 2016
REL3160 Religion and Science
This course examines how and why evolutionary theory has been identified—by groups self-described as “Creationists” or “Intelligent Design Theorists”—as being uniquely hostile to biblically-based commitments. In the first section of the course, we will explore the relevant texts from the Hebrew Bible (esp. Genesis) and the historical diversity of its interpreters. In the second section of the class, we will read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and highlight the ways its "one long argument" has been seen as buttressing, damaging or indifferent to theological claims about the history of life on earth. In the final section of the course, we will challenge the notion that the continuing “evolution-creation struggle” is about epistemology, or evidence, or rationality by emphasizing the fundamentally political nature of the controversy.
Meets Liberal studies history requirement.
Fall2015
REL3142 Religion: Self and Society
This course is structured around the methodological principle that we should abandon the habit of treating some discourses or practices as being irreducibly distinct from mundane political and economic life. That is to say, religion should not be viewed as a substantive term of analysis but as a piece of political rhetoric—a way of strategically representing some all-too-political aspects of collective life as non-political. After exploring the history of political theorizing about the proper role of religion in collective life, we turn to examine two case studies which probe the socio-taxonomic problems that the American Constitution creates by enshrining the “free exercise of religion” in the First Amendment. Fulfills Liberal Studies- Cultural Practice requirement.
REL4190 Seminar: Religion & Culture: Against Postmodernism
RLG5195 Against Postmodernism