Matthew Engelke is an anthropologist in the department of religion at Columbia University, where he also directs the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. He is the author of How to Think Like an Anthropologist (Princeton University Press, 2018), God’s Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (University of California Press, 2013), and A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (University of California Press, 2007), which won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Clifford Geertz Prize.
Matthew Engelke
Advertisement
Writing on Public Books
Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the …
Whose Life?
This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, by the philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale, is a book anyone committed to public-facing scholarship ought to take note of. This is all the …
Soft Atheism
It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place. Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. New Atheism is typically understood to have emerged in the first years of […]
Doin’ the Stuff: Reason , Belief, Modernity
A few years ago, during fieldwork I was conducting on an evangelically minded Christian charity in England, one of the managers told me about a peculiar issue the charity sometimes faced when it came to hiring new staff: job applicants felt emboldened to enlist the Heavenly Father as a reference. “God told me I was […]
