Edward Chalfant
Biographic Data
| ID | 1164574 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward Chalfant |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward |
| FAMILY NAME | Chalfant |
| SIGNATURE | CHALFANT E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3200-9099 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
I don't chase, I attract: TikTok, new thought, and the algorithms of divination
This article argues that the popularity of divination on the digital platform TikTok represents the emergence of a significant new wrinkle in metaphysical religion made possible by digital algorithms and algorithmic culture. This article aims to uncover the implicitly religious ways that some users think about digital culture as well as how engagement with algorithms continues to shape people's inhabitations of religious worlds. For example, New …
Printing Infidelity: Watson Heston and the Making of the Impressionable Freethinking Subject, 1873-1900
Nineteenth-century print media provided a set of metaphors with which American unbelievers began to articulate an understanding of religious infidelity as something permanent. Ink, paper, pencil, and mechanical printing technologies served as symbols for articulating disbelief as something imprinted indelibly on the mind of the reading or viewing subject. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, American nonbelievers began discussing infi…
Material irreligion: The role of media in atheist studies
Despite the material turn in the study of religion and the humanities and social sciences more broadly, many scholars still tend to treat atheism as a purely intellectual or philosophical position. Recent scholarship has begun to seriously examine the emotional, material, and sociopolitical bases of contemporary and historical atheism, but more work remains to be done. In particular, scholars of atheism need to pay close attention to the role of …
Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination
This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studi…
A Greimas rectangle for a new New Atheism
This paper deploys a diagrammatic tool pioneered by structuralist AJ Greimas and developed by Frederic Jameson to explicate the atheism of Slavoj Žižek. Reading the Greimas rectangle as capable of creating dynamic concepts (rather than simply mapping static structures of meaning), I show Žižek’s atheism to be an intellectual inversion of Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager. In light of contemporary criticisms of New Atheist thinkers for adopting a kind …
Atheists in American Politics: Social Movement Organizing from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries. By Richard J. Meagher
Richard Meagher’s Atheists in American Politics: Social Movement Organizing from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries is the latest in a burst of academic treatments of the history of atheist and anti-religious movements, joining Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Stephen LeDrew, Tim Whitmarsh, and others. Meagher’s study complements its predecessors, adding to a burgeoning survey of American irreligion and the diff…
Forgetting souls: Lyotard, Adorno, and the Trope of the Jew
In this article, I engage in a criticism of Jean François Lyotard's tropological approach to Judaism, arguing that his articulation of the "the jew" as figural projection serves to establish and rigidify a number of freighted binaries such as those between reason and myth, philosophy and theology, and modern and postmodern. In comparison, I posit Theodor Adorno's approach to tropes of Judaism as one which encompasses Lyotard's productive emphases…
Taylor-Made: Immanent Transcendence in A Secular Age
In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor ties modernity to a secular worldview in which any religion is understood as one possible belief among many. To make this argument, Taylor's primary foil is that of the unbeliever – the individual who regards atheism as the baseline standard for religious commitment and every religion as an unnecessary accretion on this baseline. The atheist, to Taylor, is quintessentially modern, embodying a sense of invul…
Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams: His Second Life, 1862-1891
"Sketches for "The North American Review
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838-1862
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838-1862
Journal Article Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838–1862. By Edward Chalfant. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982. 475 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.50.) Get access David R. Contosta David R. Contosta Chestnut Hill College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 70, Issue 1, June 1983, Pages 150–151, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890572 Publi…
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, his First Life, 1838-1862
I don't chase, I attract: TikTok, new thought, and the algorithms of divination
This article argues that the popularity of divination on the digital platform TikTok represents the emergence of a significant new wrinkle in metaphysical religion made possible by digital algorithms and algorithmic culture. This article aims to uncover the implicitly religious ways that some users think about digital culture as well as how engagement with algorithms continues to shape people's inhabitations of religious worlds. For example, New …
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838-1862
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838-1862
Journal Article Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams: His First Life, 1838–1862. By Edward Chalfant. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1982. 475 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.50.) Get access David R. Contosta David R. Contosta Chestnut Hill College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 70, Issue 1, June 1983, Pages 150–151, https://doi.org/10.2307/1890572 Publi…
Both Sides of the Ocean: A Biography of Henry Adams, his First Life, 1838-1862
"Sketches for "The North American Review
Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams: His Second Life, 1862-1891
Taylor-Made: Immanent Transcendence in A Secular Age
In A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor ties modernity to a secular worldview in which any religion is understood as one possible belief among many. To make this argument, Taylor's primary foil is that of the unbeliever – the individual who regards atheism as the baseline standard for religious commitment and every religion as an unnecessary accretion on this baseline. The atheist, to Taylor, is quintessentially modern, embodying a sense of invul…
Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination
This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studi…
A Greimas rectangle for a new New Atheism
This paper deploys a diagrammatic tool pioneered by structuralist AJ Greimas and developed by Frederic Jameson to explicate the atheism of Slavoj Žižek. Reading the Greimas rectangle as capable of creating dynamic concepts (rather than simply mapping static structures of meaning), I show Žižek’s atheism to be an intellectual inversion of Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager. In light of contemporary criticisms of New Atheist thinkers for adopting a kind …
Atheists in American Politics: Social Movement Organizing from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries. By Richard J. Meagher
Richard Meagher’s Atheists in American Politics: Social Movement Organizing from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries is the latest in a burst of academic treatments of the history of atheist and anti-religious movements, joining Richard Cimino and Christopher Smith, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Stephen LeDrew, Tim Whitmarsh, and others. Meagher’s study complements its predecessors, adding to a burgeoning survey of American irreligion and the diff…
Forgetting souls: Lyotard, Adorno, and the Trope of the Jew
In this article, I engage in a criticism of Jean François Lyotard's tropological approach to Judaism, arguing that his articulation of the "the jew" as figural projection serves to establish and rigidify a number of freighted binaries such as those between reason and myth, philosophy and theology, and modern and postmodern. In comparison, I posit Theodor Adorno's approach to tropes of Judaism as one which encompasses Lyotard's productive emphases…
Material irreligion: The role of media in atheist studies
Despite the material turn in the study of religion and the humanities and social sciences more broadly, many scholars still tend to treat atheism as a purely intellectual or philosophical position. Recent scholarship has begun to seriously examine the emotional, material, and sociopolitical bases of contemporary and historical atheism, but more work remains to be done. In particular, scholars of atheism need to pay close attention to the role of …
Printing Infidelity: Watson Heston and the Making of the Impressionable Freethinking Subject, 1873-1900
Nineteenth-century print media provided a set of metaphors with which American unbelievers began to articulate an understanding of religious infidelity as something permanent. Ink, paper, pencil, and mechanical printing technologies served as symbols for articulating disbelief as something imprinted indelibly on the mind of the reading or viewing subject. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, American nonbelievers began discussing infi…
I don't chase, I attract: TikTok, new thought, and the algorithms of divination
This article argues that the popularity of divination on the digital platform TikTok represents the emergence of a significant new wrinkle in metaphysical religion made possible by digital algorithms and algorithmic culture. This article aims to uncover the implicitly religious ways that some users think about digital culture as well as how engagement with algorithms continues to shape people's inhabitations of religious worlds. For example, New …
Philosophy (11 works) · Art (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · American Environmental and Regional History (4 works) · Biography (4 works) · History (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works)