Colin Elliott's "Pox Romana: The Plague that Shook the World" (2024): The Unabridged Review

May 21, 2026 Leonardo Ambasciano

The front cover of Elliott’s *Pox Romana* (2024). **Source**: personal collection.

The lesson of Elliott’s impeccably researched book is clear. Environmental cataclysms are always exacerbated and turned into epoch-defining catastrophes by poor decision making and institutional ignorance (Elliott 2024: 40). The Antonine Plague fuelled anxiety, anxiety turned into angst, angst bred panic, and panic led to scapegoating, persecutions, and the totalitarian politicisation of religion. Religion never happens in a void, and while history does not repeat itself, it sure does rhyme.

The Bizarro World of Eliadology: An Extended Commentary on Gabriel Badea’s “Mircea Eliade, între tradiţionalism şi modernism. Posteritatea critică în Italia” (2022)

February 14, 2026 Leonardo Ambasciano

The cover of Badea’s *Mircea Eliade, între tradiţionalism şi modernism. Posteritatea critică în Italia* (2022). **SOURCE**: private collection.

Sciamanesimo senza sciamanesimo, my research monograph about the Interwar intellectual roots and postwar development of Mircea Eliade’s key concept of shamanism (Nuova Cultura, Rome 2014), has been recently appraised as a positivistic and postmodernist faux pas in the reception of Eliade’s works within the Italian History of Religions. This assessment, which suffers from questionable premises and disciplinary misunderstandings, is found in Gabriel Badea’s Mircea Eliade, între tradiţionalism şi modernism (Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, Bucharest 2022). This post offers a critical rebuttal of Badea’s biased interpretation, methodological contradictions, and historiographical blunders, with larger implications for his entire reconstruction of the Italian postwar discipline. I also take this opportunity to clarify, ten years after its original publication, the epistemological, ethical, and historiographical method and theory of my 2014 monograph.

Ad Philologum: A Reply to Gregory D. Alles

December 10, 2025 Leonardo Ambasciano

The cover of *Studying the Religious Mind*. **SOURCE**: personal collection. © Equinox.

While I am glad to know that in his review of “Studying the Religious Mind” G. D. Alles concurs with me that “post-truth and folk-historical thinking” need to be banished from our field(s), I have to confess my discomfiture for his critical remarks – which I found baffling for a series of reasons that need to be unpacked to be properly understood.

Nickolas Roubekas' "The Study of Greek and Roman Religions" (2024): The Review Redux

September 25, 2025 Leonardo Ambasciano

The front cover of Roubekas’ *The Study of Greek and Roman Religions* (2024). **Source**: Bloomsbury.

Nickolas Roubekas’ The Study of Greek and Roman Religions clearly shows that the toolboxes and the results of the academic disciplines that study religion(s) from a critical and/or socio-scientific perspective continue by and large to be ignored by classicists, while the modern disciplines that have inherited the scholarly responsibilities of the old Victorian Science of Religion keep on tolerating, if not supporting, a fideistic and (crypto-)theology-friendly status quo.

The Disneyfication of Peter Parker

July 14, 2025 Leonardo Ambasciano

*Marvel/Disney: What If Goofy Became Spider-Man?* #1. Cover by Francesco D’Ippolito. Source: AITP. © 2025 Disney/Marvel.

Musings on the current comic book industry crisis and the editorially-mandated arrested development of Peter Parker/Spider-Man, with some witty observations unearthed from an 1983 article by none other than Alan Moore. In Marv Wolfman’s own words: “if [Peter Parker]’s still fouling up as an adult, he just isn’t a hero anymore. He’s pathetic.”

Academia sure is weird

February 15, 2025 Leonardo Ambasciano

**SOURCE**: logo from the Reading Religion website.

The “most religious essay of the volume? Neuroscientists as “inscrutable specialists”?! “Cosmic explanation”?!? WHAT?!

Captain’s log, Supplemental – Ligurian Summer 2024

January 9, 2025 Leonardo Ambasciano

A quick post to add another batch of (poorly edited) pics to my ongoing exploration of Liguria.

Enjoy!

ALL PHOTOS BY LEONARDO AMBASCIANO, 2024 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED OTHERWISE.

BONUS FEATURE!

Some additional photos from the MAU (Museo d’Arte Urbana di Torino; Museum of Urban Art, Turin) in Borgo Campidoglio, Turin, further up in Northeastern Italy. As far as I can gather from the official website, this is the first bottom-up, permanent, open-air, contemporary art museum located within an urban center in Italy. What a remarkable experience: you gotta see it to believe it.

ALL PHOTOS BY LEONARDO AMBASCIANO, 2024 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED OTHERWISE.

Notes

This post was updated on 11 January 2025.

Crop circles, Superman Movies, and scraped palimpsests: Weird passages from Claire White’s “An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion”

December 27, 2024 Leonardo Ambasciano

The cover of Claire White’s *An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion: Connecting Evolution, Brain, Cognition, and Culture*. The image depicted on the cover is a “full brain tractography with artistic color” (from the back cover). The fact that a book about cognition presents itself to the readers with a neuroimaging picture is problematic, to say the least. See text for details. **Source**: personal collection.

I have eagerly waited for a general, comprehensive, and user-friendly introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) for many, many years. Finally, the book I’ve long dreamed about is here. And the result, while impressive in sheer size and scope, leaves much to be desired.

Truth, Justice, and the Monthly Floppy

February 21, 2024 Leonardo Ambasciano

**Fig. 1**. The cover of *Superman* #1 (1939), with art by Joe Shuster, graded and slabbed by CGC. See text for details. © DC Comics /Heritage Auctions. **Source:** Heritage Auctions.

When Congressman Robert Garcia was sworn into office in January 2023 on the US Constitution he didn’t have the Bible or any other sacred text with him. Not that it was required to have one. As per Article VI, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution, there is no official requirement to be sworn in on a religious text for the Oath of Office: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” But, in a sense, he did have a sacred text with him: a copy of Superman (vol. 1) #1 (published by National Comics/Dc Comics, cover date June 1939) borrowed from the Library of Congress.

Ligurian Dreams

May 26, 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano

The gods had a dream, and the dream’s name was Liguria. Dolceacqua (Liguria, Italy). 2023 Leonardo Ambasciano (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

When I was young, there was always something missing in me.

Everywhere I went, I felt like I didn’t belong, like I couldn’t belong. My father left his seaside hometown in Liguria for Turin, a huge industrial city at the foothills of the Alps, in the 1970s, and from there he went abroad in the 1980s. When I was three years old my family decided to come back to Turin but, by that time, my father had already started globetrotting for work. We started spending give or take half a year in Turin and half a year in Liguria, some time in my father’s seaside town and some time in my mother’s mountain village.

Blog [EN]

Notes