Sharday Catherine Mosurinjohn
Biographic Data
| ID | 1601215 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharday Catherine Mosurinjohn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharday Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Mosurinjohn |
| SIGNATURE | MOSURINJOHN S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9829-8551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Social Science of QAnon
QAnon has emerged as the defining conspiracy group of our times, and its far-right conspiracies are extraordinary for their breadth and extremity. Bringing together scholars from psychology, sociology, communications, and political science, this cutting-edge volume uses social science theory to investigate aspects of QAnon. Following an introduction to the 'who, what, and why' of QAnon, Part I focuses on the psychological characteristics of QAnon…
Debating Critical Religion
The Age of (the Algorithmic) Aquarius
Around the time when Jacob Boss approached us with the invitation to contribute to this American Religion roundtable on AI and algorithms, I (Sharday Mosurinjohn) had just been introduced to the esoteric algorithm called "Human Design" 1 by a friend in the psychedelic space, which is where the bulk of my research now takes place. 2 As I delved deeper into the world of psychonauts and psychedelic scientists, I discovered a vibrant cauldron, bubbli…
Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules? Why There Must Be More Ways to Be “Critical” in the Study of Religion
According to some of the most vocal proponents of Critical Religion (CR), taking CR seriously entails accepting that religion as an analytic category leads to reification and naturalization and is unduly normative, thus critical scholars of religion should abandon it and restrict ourselves to studying discursive battles over the uses of religion. In this article, we build on the case for alternative critical proposals by offering an immanent crit…
Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters
This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of "fabulation", an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually "authorizing". By "fabulation", we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within anothe…
Objects, affects, aesthetics
This article provides a picture for religious studies scholars of the overlaps and differences between three recent theories of material religion which concern human perception, perceptible things, and the sometimes imperceptible forces that configure humans and things. The theories of note are: affect studies (an approach to the visceral forces that drive relations between beings); object-oriented ontology (a contentious movement in speculative …
Threshold concepts in religious studies
This article explores “threshold concepts” in North American religious studies undergraduate education. The threshold concepts approach concentrates on how certain concepts or learning experiences can act like the threshold of a doorway that opens onto a new perspective for the learner. Crucially, they come into play in learning to think like a professional within a discipline. Little work has been done on threshold concepts in religious studies.…
Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn
This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, …
The Future of Immortality
The striking cover image of Anya Bernstein’s The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia is “Papilarnie III” (2015) by the Polish artist Janusz Jurek. Jurek’s medium in this piece is known as “generative” art in which the artist designs algorithms that generate the image and builds in randomness to the algorithm; collaboratively, artist and computer invent new bodies. One could mistake the following description of ge…
A Cult of Cookie Bakers
This article analyzes the growing youth social justice initiative Free the Children/ME to WE as a kind of "spiritual movement" by demonstrating how the discourses utilized by participants and authorities resemble both the discourse of self-spirituality, as found among actual millennials, and the discourse of youth spirituality found in the developmental sciences literature. Building on previous research in which we characterized this family of or…
Free the Children as a ‘new secular spiritual movement’
The movement under study, Free the Children (FtC), is a youth empowerment organization that was founded in 1995 by a Canadian teenager, who, twenty years on, remains its leader today. Though it does not define itself as either a religion or an alternative to religion, it frequently uses the language of ‘spirituality’. Moreover, it meets all five criteria proposed by Lorne Dawson [2006. “New Religious Movements.” In The Blackwell Companion to the …
The dance between artefact, commodity and fetish
In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret 'African collections' from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of 'superstition' or 'witchcraft' in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV's court at the same …
Popular Journalism, Religious Morality, and the Canadian Imaginary
In Canada, opposition toward GLBQ identities and practices has been almost entirely religious in nature. On the other hand, antipathy toward “undesirable” immigrant profiles—ironically, often those perceived as homophobic and misogynistic—has been articulated through arguments about the supposed incompatibility of their religious values (usually Islamic) with “Canadian” mores. This paper analyzes a variety of national news media to demonstrate ho…
Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules? Why There Must Be More Ways to Be “Critical” in the Study of Religion
According to some of the most vocal proponents of Critical Religion (CR), taking CR seriously entails accepting that religion as an analytic category leads to reification and naturalization and is unduly normative, thus critical scholars of religion should abandon it and restrict ourselves to studying discursive battles over the uses of religion. In this article, we build on the case for alternative critical proposals by offering an immanent crit…
Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn
This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, …
The Age of (the Algorithmic) Aquarius
Around the time when Jacob Boss approached us with the invitation to contribute to this American Religion roundtable on AI and algorithms, I (Sharday Mosurinjohn) had just been introduced to the esoteric algorithm called "Human Design" 1 by a friend in the psychedelic space, which is where the bulk of my research now takes place. 2 As I delved deeper into the world of psychonauts and psychedelic scientists, I discovered a vibrant cauldron, bubbli…
Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters
This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of "fabulation", an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually "authorizing". By "fabulation", we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within anothe…
Objects, affects, aesthetics
This article provides a picture for religious studies scholars of the overlaps and differences between three recent theories of material religion which concern human perception, perceptible things, and the sometimes imperceptible forces that configure humans and things. The theories of note are: affect studies (an approach to the visceral forces that drive relations between beings); object-oriented ontology (a contentious movement in speculative …
The dance between artefact, commodity and fetish
In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret 'African collections' from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of 'superstition' or 'witchcraft' in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV's court at the same …
Popular Journalism, Religious Morality, and the Canadian Imaginary
In Canada, opposition toward GLBQ identities and practices has been almost entirely religious in nature. On the other hand, antipathy toward “undesirable” immigrant profiles—ironically, often those perceived as homophobic and misogynistic—has been articulated through arguments about the supposed incompatibility of their religious values (usually Islamic) with “Canadian” mores. This paper analyzes a variety of national news media to demonstrate ho…
Popular Journalism, Religious Morality, and the Canadian Imaginary
In Canada, opposition toward GLBQ identities and practices has been almost entirely religious in nature. On the other hand, antipathy toward “undesirable” immigrant profiles—ironically, often those perceived as homophobic and misogynistic—has been articulated through arguments about the supposed incompatibility of their religious values (usually Islamic) with “Canadian” mores. This paper analyzes a variety of national news media to demonstrate ho…
Free the Children as a ‘new secular spiritual movement’
The movement under study, Free the Children (FtC), is a youth empowerment organization that was founded in 1995 by a Canadian teenager, who, twenty years on, remains its leader today. Though it does not define itself as either a religion or an alternative to religion, it frequently uses the language of ‘spirituality’. Moreover, it meets all five criteria proposed by Lorne Dawson [2006. “New Religious Movements.” In The Blackwell Companion to the …
The dance between artefact, commodity and fetish
In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret 'African collections' from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of 'superstition' or 'witchcraft' in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV's court at the same …
A Cult of Cookie Bakers
This article analyzes the growing youth social justice initiative Free the Children/ME to WE as a kind of "spiritual movement" by demonstrating how the discourses utilized by participants and authorities resemble both the discourse of self-spirituality, as found among actual millennials, and the discourse of youth spirituality found in the developmental sciences literature. Building on previous research in which we characterized this family of or…
The Future of Immortality
The striking cover image of Anya Bernstein’s The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia is “Papilarnie III” (2015) by the Polish artist Janusz Jurek. Jurek’s medium in this piece is known as “generative” art in which the artist designs algorithms that generate the image and builds in randomness to the algorithm; collaboratively, artist and computer invent new bodies. One could mistake the following description of ge…
Threshold concepts in religious studies
This article explores “threshold concepts” in North American religious studies undergraduate education. The threshold concepts approach concentrates on how certain concepts or learning experiences can act like the threshold of a doorway that opens onto a new perspective for the learner. Crucially, they come into play in learning to think like a professional within a discipline. Little work has been done on threshold concepts in religious studies.…
Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn
This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, …
Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules? Why There Must Be More Ways to Be “Critical” in the Study of Religion
According to some of the most vocal proponents of Critical Religion (CR), taking CR seriously entails accepting that religion as an analytic category leads to reification and naturalization and is unduly normative, thus critical scholars of religion should abandon it and restrict ourselves to studying discursive battles over the uses of religion. In this article, we build on the case for alternative critical proposals by offering an immanent crit…
Fabulation, Machine Agents, and Spiritually Authorizing Encounters
This paper uses a Tavesian model of religious experience to make a modest theorization about the role of "fabulation", an embodied and affective process, to understand how some contemporary AI and robotics designers and users consider encounters with these technologies to be spiritually "authorizing". By "fabulation", we mean the Bergsonian concept of an evolved capacity that allows humans to see the potentialities of complex action within anothe…
Objects, affects, aesthetics
This article provides a picture for religious studies scholars of the overlaps and differences between three recent theories of material religion which concern human perception, perceptible things, and the sometimes imperceptible forces that configure humans and things. The theories of note are: affect studies (an approach to the visceral forces that drive relations between beings); object-oriented ontology (a contentious movement in speculative …
The Social Science of QAnon
QAnon has emerged as the defining conspiracy group of our times, and its far-right conspiracies are extraordinary for their breadth and extremity. Bringing together scholars from psychology, sociology, communications, and political science, this cutting-edge volume uses social science theory to investigate aspects of QAnon. Following an introduction to the 'who, what, and why' of QAnon, Part I focuses on the psychological characteristics of QAnon…
Debating Critical Religion
The Age of (the Algorithmic) Aquarius
Around the time when Jacob Boss approached us with the invitation to contribute to this American Religion roundtable on AI and algorithms, I (Sharday Mosurinjohn) had just been introduced to the esoteric algorithm called "Human Design" 1 by a friend in the psychedelic space, which is where the bulk of my research now takes place. 2 As I delved deeper into the world of psychonauts and psychedelic scientists, I discovered a vibrant cauldron, bubbli…
Sociology (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (5 works) · Politics (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works)