Every friday, I publish The Week in Conspiracy, a roundup of news stories and the best articles from across the web, news and academia, over at Paper.li.
Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University | Co-founding Editor of the Religious Studies Project | Editor, Implicit Religion | Bulletin Editor of the British Association for the Study of Religion.
This site is where I promote my books and collect all the little bits of writing I do in other places. On the right you’ll find my most popular posts, and at the top my major publications. You can email me at david.robertson [at] open.ac.uk.
An Economy of Gnosticism in Los Angeles — Contemporary religion in historical perspective
In case you missed it, here’s a piece about my recent trip to Los Angeles to do fieldwork with various Gnostic groups, which was published on the Open University’s Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective blog a couple of months ago.
If I were a certain kind of scholar, I might speculate that there is so much gnosticism in LA because Hollywood is the symbolic centre of the archonic media matrix where the illusory world of the demiurge is created. More prosaically, LA has long been a centre for religious innovation due to being multicultural, liberal and relatively cheap. People were going West in search of new ways of life long before the Hippies emerged from Haight-Ashbury to catalyse the spiritual revolution of the New Age movement. Moreover, contemporary gnostics mix esoteric ideas with Christianity, and so appeal much more to American Baby Boomers than to their relatively secularised European counterparts.
Being back at davidgrobertson for the first time in months, I see an update / refresh is in order…
New Review in Nova Religio
Very pleased (and surprised) by Kelly E. Hayes’ review of UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age in the most recent issue of Nova Religio. I face an uphill battle to convince most of my colleagues why the work I do is even valid in the first place, so comments like these are most welcome indeed!
With its concise prose and engaging style, Robertson’s book offers not only a compelling analysis of contemporary millennialism, but an equally compelling model of critical rigor.
Real People, on the Ground | Studying Religion in Culture
A blog post for the University of Alabama about how critical studies in religion need to do more to demonstrate their practical utility, and how my editorship of Implicit Religion aims to help in doing that.
https://religion.ua.edu/blog/2019/03/27/real-people-on-the-ground/
The fact is that what gets counted as religion in specific contexts is perhaps the most impactful question we can ask as social scientists. Far from being merely discourse-about-discourse in some Ivory Tower, the critical approach shows what the category is actually doing in the real world – both to those whom it constrains, and those for whom it is useful.
The Claypool Lennon Delirium – ‘Blood And Rockets’
This combines many of my deepest passions – prog rock, the Beatles, and 20th century Magic(k). Hearing Les Claypool sing “Do What Thy Will” in 5/4 rings a lot of bells for me.
Sean Lennon is obviously interested in Magick – he talked about it in an interview with Billboard recently – but it sounds like a passing interest rather than something he is actively engaged with. I also would quibble with “he belonged to a magical cult”. The interview is pretty light but I enjoyed the brief description of how he and Les Claypool work together. The album’s up on Spotify now and I like it. I’ll buy it if I see it on vinyl.
Why looking through the lens of religion can help us to understand the popularity of conspiracy theories like Pizzagate | USAPP
A short piece co-written with Asbjorn Dyrendal for the LSE’s American Policy and Politics blog.
Discordianism Meets Ufology Part 00004: Were Gray Barker and Jim Moseley Original Discordians? | Historia Discordia
New Publication | Brill Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion
I am very pleased to see the book I’ve been working on for the last couple of years finally published (online, at least). The Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion was co-edited with Asbjorn Dyrendal and Egil Asprem, and it was a real pleasure to work with them – we all contributed actively and collaboratively, and I learned a great deal from them both. I think this will be an agenda-setting volume in this little subfield, and part of a group of new publications looking at CTs critically and interdisciplinarily.
Conspiracy theories are a ubiquitous feature of our times. The Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion is the first reference work to offer a comprehensive, transnational overview of this phenomenon along with in-depth discussions of how conspiracy theories relate to religion(s). Bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines, from psychology and philosophy to political science and the history of religions, the book sets the standard for the interdisciplinary study of religion and conspiracy theories.
Chapters include methodological overviews from sociology, psychology and philosophy; regional case studies on Sri Lanka, Albania, Greece, Japan and elsewhere; thematic chapters on popular music, Esotericism, Church of the SubGenius, neo-Nazism, the Internet; and more. If you have institutional access, you should check it out. Please!
