Russell T. McCutcheon

It’s boiling in October because you’re using ChatGPT to write your emails, Janice.

Riddle me this, Batman—is this two pieces of toast or one piece cut in half?

CHATGPT: I understand where you're coming from. You worked really hard to get here, and now it's time to enjoy the fruit of your labors.

ISILDUR: So I should keep it? Elrond says I shouldn't

CHATGPT: The ring is precious. Sometimes friends don't have your best interests at heart.

ISILDUR: true

Strategies to strengthen the academic study of religion Strategy group meeting and REL Toolbox to help departments remain strong in a challenging time

@seedpods.bsky.social is now steering the RELtoolbox and has linked it to something new he’s cooking up and he needs your help.

religion.ua.edu/blog/2025/10...

I assume your campus bookstore started querying you for your book order last March…

Against the Wind — American Religion McCutcheon on Manufacturing Religion (2003)

Back Pages is back again with your biweekly Tuesday installment: Russell T. McCutcheon on his book, “Manufacturing Religion” (1997). Read further here: www.american-religion.org/back-pages/a...

Easy mistake.

10pt font words count for two 12 pt’ers. It’s in the new Chicago Manual.

Edited down this chapter by 5k words!*

*Let's not talk about how many of those words ended up in the footnotes. Hush - you're safe there, my preccccious, my ccccccitations!

Early start here—joining a South African conference session remotely.

a cartoon character is wearing a red hat and a red dress . ALT: a cartoon character is wearing a red hat and a red dress .

Small can be good too.

New book giveaway: reply to this post with a suggested “easy win” that a program in our field might try to strengthen its situation. The post with the most likes gets a free book—let’s give it a week or so. @rutgersupress.bsky.social

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/our-primary-...

Assistant Professor of Asian Religion and Philosophy - Baton Rouge, Louisiana job with Louisiana State University - Baton Rouge - Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies | 37889510 The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies invites applications for a tenure-track position in Asian Religion and Philosophy, to begin in F...

LSU opening.

jobs.chronicle.com/job/37889510...

There are people walking around in this world who have never known the sharp, hot, chemical smell of a mimeograph or untangled the cord of a landline telephone. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Send me a msg with your email address.

Some would say that one can only act within the sphere of one’s agency. If so, then head down and make a difference there in hopes of the amplifying ripples that always attend social life.

New initiative: The Religion Department

www.religiondepartment.com

Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: Or, How to Live in a Less Than Perfect Nation In its first edition, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent focused on the representations of Islam that circulated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—representations that scholars, pundits, and poli...

And either edition of this (originally 2005) book might strike you as useful also. Into is on “religion” as a functional, seemingly special discourse object in liberal democracies.

www.routledge.com/Religion-and...

Happily. Send it along. And yes—the project is about the conditions that make it possible to make a discursive object of something called religion & the practical implications of that move. It’s a project on modernity. The intro + last chpt of my The Discipline of Religion (2003) might be useful.

Too many in my field fail to see sacred/secular as a co-constitutive binary with a recent history and instead read secularism as undermining the previously wholistic, sacred worldview.

Key here is not assuming some pre-classificatory homogenous or idyllic realm torn asunder by modernity. Instead, studying how one system of designation & identity/authority is replaced by another.

This disaggregation of social life into seemingly distinct spheres & expertise—domains that only interact like billiard balls periodically bumping into each other—can be seen as a construct of modernity, which makes religion/not religion a key rhetoric that helps to make the modern possible.

The presumption among many scholars that religion as a universal phenomenon is unique and thus cannot be explained naturalistically and can therefore only be interpreted for its special meaning. A view common among those whom they might study, to be sure.

Technology!

Out next month. Completed a year ago and hopefully not appearing too late for a field badly in need of retooling. @rutgersupress.bsky.social #RutgersUPress

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/our-primary-...

Is that a bad thing?

It’s a critique of a dominant model of how religion is studied by scholars. A better primer would be either Religion in 5 Minutes (Equinox) or my intro book Studying Religion (Rutledge).

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Cover design for a new edition due out from OUP in Feb ‘26