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Category Archives: Aaron W. Hughes
The Hero System of Professor Aaron W. Hughes
Aaron Hughes makes his living by subtraction. He takes a tradition that calls itself ancient and shows it modern, a continuity that calls itself natural and shows it built, an identity that calls itself given and shows it made. The … Continue reading
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Cold Eyes on Sacred Ground – The Aaron W. Hughes Story
Aaron W. Hughes was born on August 15, 1968, in Edmonton, Alberta, to a Scottish-Canadian father from Glasgow and a mother whose Lebanese parents had settled in Canada’s Northwest Territories. That mixed heritage, European and Arab, gave him an early … Continue reading
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Ten Convenient Beliefs For Religion Scholar Aaron W. Hughes
Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) describes beliefs that work as coordination devices. They need not map reality. They hold a group together, lower friction inside it, license continued action, and spare the man who holds them costly self-examination or outside … Continue reading
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Decoding Religious Studies Scholar Aaron W. Hughes
What jumps out to me about his work is its depth, breadth and brutal clarity. This guy has a beautiful mind. Aaron W. Hughes operates as a structuralist who demands that the academic study of religion return to its role … Continue reading
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Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada (2020)
Aaron W. Hughes responds to his critics: …all our narratives, terms, categories, and frames of reference emerge from the shadows, and we would do well to illumine them. Only by understanding these narratives and frames of reference—their genealogies, their investment … Continue reading
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Science Envy in Theories of Religion
Aaron W. Hughes published in 2010: In the recently published Contemporary Theories of Religion (Stausberg; 2009, hereafter CTR), at least 9 of the 15 chapters are devoted to theories that interpret and/or explain religion from perspectives that can loosely be … Continue reading
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The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation
Aaron W. Hughes writes in 2010: * …I cannot agree with them that the Hebrew Bible preserves some transcendent power. I thus read Buber and Rosenzweig as I read everyone in this book: against the grain. * The mythology engulfing … Continue reading
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From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada
Aaron W. Hughes writes in this 2020 book: * The academic study of religion, for all intents and purposes, began in Germany in the nineteenth century. Its goal was, as indeed it still is, to understand the religions of the … Continue reading
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Jewish Philosophy and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Aaron W. Hughes writes in 2014: * Having grown up non-Jewishly in a home completely devoid of Judaism, let alone any religion, my path to the tradition, both intellectual and spiritual, for all intents and purposes only began in graduate … Continue reading
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The Study of Judaism: Authenticity, Identity, Scholarship
Here are some highlights from this 2014 book by Aaron W. Hughes: * In 2007 I published a slim and what I hoped would be a provocative volume entitled Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline. This … Continue reading
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