Cara Burnidge
Historian of religion and politics in the US specializing in Gilded Age and Progressive Era, reform movements, and religious debates about American democracy.
Views are my own, not my employer’s. Likes and reposts are not endorsements.
- Reposted by Cara Burnidgeyou personally have the ability to secure elections for yourself and your neighbors.
- There are at least 2 things here that humanities-based Religion scholars do well & can help students do too: 1. Analyze competing religious claims (Pope Leo vs Johnson’s Christianity) 2. Analyze Christian secularism(s) Poll data doesn’t help the public figure out what to do here
- It’s shaping up to be quite the day in Iowa education news. 3 stories worth your time even if you’re not in Iowa There’s the Republican gubernatorial debate 👇which has all candidates seeking to target teacher training/higher education as a blueprint for attacking “leftist indoctrination” 1/
- Reposted by Cara BurnidgeNEW: I was one of 3 reporters granted access to the convening of 600+ clergy in Minneapolis this week. It was a striking show of solidarity with MN clergy resisting ICE, but heralded something else: the emergence of a vast, faith-based network trained to resist ICE. religionnews.com/2026/01/23/i...
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- So much to explore and analyze when it comes to religion, Jan 6, and our memories of it. @miketheprofessor.bsky.social and @petermanseau.bsky.social did us all a service by creating the Uncivil Religion digital resource. uncivilreligion.org/home/about-t...
- If you, like me, will be talking about celebrity culture and religion this spring with students, I suggest checking out: Kathryn Lofton’s “Sacrificing Britney” in Consuming Religion (Chicago, 2017) as one way to get at these themes.
- I hope to see you there!
- RIP #MTV which I featured for the first time in American Religious Diversity this year to talk about the Tibetan Freedom concerts. A rich text of religion, politics, youth culture, and consumerism. youtu.be/2z-po-l-pVc?...
- It's time for @laurenfturek.bsky.social & I to celebrate the book birthday for The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775! 44 chapters, 48 contributors representing both History & Religious Studies www.routledge.com/The-Routledg... 1/n
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- Reposted by Cara BurnidgeSeems like it's worth posting this one again.
- Reposted by Cara BurnidgeGrading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
- This is happening beyond Texas. It’s considered in the purview of any centralized tech office bc they “own” the infrastructure. Routine exercises testing the system & their new shiny tools. Typically, there is no one in the room to say “hey. Wait a minute. Maybe we shouldn’t create a blacklist?”
- Similarly after the Joplin, Mo E5 in 2011, tractors from family farms in our KS-MO border counties crawled to Joplin thru the night to clear debris. There were roads again by the time FEMA & the national guard arrived. We went without knowing if we could help but knowing we had to try.
- “I never despaired about my students, who, when our conditions allowed it, showed me again and again how close reading requires and multiplies both trust and strength.”
- I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
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- Chatbot Jesus is many things. one of them is a sign of how little many Christians seem to care about biblical exegesis. There could be really rich conversations about what informs the code (as @robertpjones.bsky.social suggests) but that seems absent. The goal is to offload interpretation entirely
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- Reposted by Cara BurnidgeICE vs the clergy
- My dept is hiring in Religious Ethics! 4/4 load, renewable term with path to promotion (not tenure stream). Specialty open in applied ethics. Happy to answer questions! #SBLAAR25 #AARSBL25 @aarwomenscaucus.bsky.social uni.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UNI/jo...
- This Back Pages series is wonderful! I have been thinking about this book on and off for the last year! I’m so glad it’s featured here because, as AP notes, there are through lines to reckon with, especially when trying to understand how white Christian women wield piety as power.
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- "We want to gear on the side of entertainment," he said, "because we think especially biblical content is over-indexed to educational." …is a remarkable statement given Religious Studies Departments around the country closing.
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- One of the reading groups this fall at my institution is @cjdenial.bsky.social Pedagogy of Kindness. Love to see it!
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- So much is happening in the Sweeney ad and it’s not just the play on the word “jeans.” There’s also a play being had on emphasizing her jeans being “blue.” How did blue get passed down for generations? www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ame...
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- <turning to look directly at the camera from an office at a public, teaching-emphasis university>
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- How to I not merely dislike a Spotify suggestion but make the algorithm feel shame for even suggesting it in the first place?
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- “His deftness in removing the specter of violence from his own narrative is a reminder of the ways violence against women is normalized. It isn’t that people don’t believe in what happened to Jolie on that plane — they just don’t care.”
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- This is part of the reason why for all the shade theoryheads throw at description vs analysis (because description is assumed to be advocacy), I think it still matters to describe religion It’s a real struggle to have students write or say something with descriptive accuracy and withhold analysis
- If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the news yet committed to talking about hard things with students, @laurenfturek.bsky.social and I edited a volume that might help: Routledge History of Religion & Politics in the US Since 1775 www.routledge.com/The-Routledg... Relevant to this week’s news …1/?
- Dropping lore and suggesting side quests is pretty much all I’d like to do ever. Why limit this to a summer?
- I am curious to see how evangelical orgs will respond since international students are a sizeble part of their campus ministries across the country. This is one of the issues that puts evangelicals at a crossroads with their loyalties See: global.oup.com/academic/pro...
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- Reposted by Cara Burnidge“The pope will be from Chicago” sounds like an 1880s Republican’s dire prediction for if we don’t stop Irish immigration
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- Sounds like an excellent time to hear from some experts on the history of religion in America, folks.
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- An evergreen skeet if I ever saw one
