Brad Stoddard

A collection of short essays, written to be used in the introductory college classroom, that address some of the popular but unexamined claims that people tend to have about religion—that it makes adherents moral, that it's a private matter, that it's inherently violent, and so on. As with any such collection, some are stronger than others—I was bemused by one piece which critiqued "religious studies" as a field/concept overly Christian in its assumptions, yet which used "Judeo-Christian" as an unproblematic and undefined category and which defined pre-16th-century Christianity entirely in terms of the Latin West—but there are certainly some pieces which could be productively used as jumping off points in the classroom.… (meer)