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Money, by 401(K) 2012 (CC BY-SA 2.0). From Flickr.
I recently had the pleasure of exchanging a couple of emails with a colleague of mine regarding my latest published article, He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune. In that article, I expanded some of the topics I presented in my speech during the 2021 BASR Annual Conference held (virtually) in Edinburgh.
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Another place, another time. Liguria, Italy. 2016, (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Leonardo Ambasciano.
In 2019 I saw the effects of man-made climate change with my own eyes.
It was a scorching 40°C outside, well above the usually mild June temperatures of the Ligurian Riviera. The air was blistering hot, like the devil’s breath. The pitiful shrubs and the wilted flowerbeds on the sidewalk reminded me of something from a bygone era, like fossilised remains of a poor urban planning from another century. The few and far-between palms on the boulevard provided no shade at all. An elderly lady fainted a few metres from me, collapsing lifeless on the ground.
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Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. Source: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck.
Introduction to the Critical and Interdisciplinary Study of Religion 101: A work in progress.
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Sources in chronological order: HuffPost, 3 May 2018 (the bust in the middle was vandalized in 2018; in 2020 the statue was toppled by protesters); BBC News, 8 June 2020; BBC News, 9 June 2020; The Virginian Pilot, 10 June 2020; BBC News, 11 June 2020; Sky News Italy, 14 June 2020; CNN, 19 June 2020. An updated list of monuments toppled or removed during the 2020 protests is available on Wikipedia. Composition © 2021, L. Ambasciano.
It’s quite mind-boggling how the most toxic scholars of the past in the academic study of religion(s) have escaped unscathed the BLM movement’s criticism or the fury of cancel culture. How come statues like those dedicated to Churchill, Washington, Columbus, Confederates, slave traders, and racists all the world over were defaced or toppled down last year while the busts of Mircea Eliade are still standing? How is it possible that a chair at the University of Chicago is still entitled to Eliade while cancel culture is reclaiming so many academic and intellectual victims almost on a daily basis?
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The Battle of Balaclava, 2020 edition: the Russian artillery stands for SARS-CoV-2; the Light Brigade of the Six Hundred is herd immunity. Source: Charge of the Light Brigade by R. C. Woodville Jr. Wikipedia.
The response by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his team to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been dismal. On 12 March, I had to endure possibly one of the most cringeworthy political speeches of recent history, when Johnson addressed the nation to tell its citizens that despite the fact that “many more families [were] going to lose loved ones before their time” (meaning the elderly), there was basically nothing to do in terms of prevention (Stewart, Proctor and Siddique 2020). Johnson’s statement was mind-boggling for a variety of reason, the most astounding of which was that the core Tory electorate is currently made up of older people (Inman 2019). You get what you vote for, I guess (Walker 2020), but is a selective culling of the elderly really what elderly Conservative voters voted for during the recent national election?
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