A Riposte to James C. Ungureanu’s Review of “An Unnatural History of Religions” (2019)

July 31, 2022 Leonardo Ambasciano

Some remarkable works published by Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Personal collection. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Leonardo Ambasciano.

James Ungureanu has recently published a peculiar review of my book An Unnatural History of Religions in the March 2022 issue of Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society. At the very beginning of his contribution, Ungureanu claims that I was “upset” when I “bemoan[ed] rather petulantly” (sic), “lamented”, and “artlessly proclaim[ed in my book my] deepest convictions”, that is, some Lapalissian statements that are part of the current scientific consensus and are directed against pseudohistorical assertions and neocreationist, esotericist, and spiritualist dogmas that characterise the past, and to some extent the present, of the academic field known as History of Religions. I was certainly not “upset” when I wrote the uncontroversial lines that managed to provoke such a defensive reaction in the reviewer. However, being “upset” is exactly the emotional state I was in after reading Ungureanu’s review.

My J. Z. Smith is a pheneticist (sort of)

April 30, 2022 Leonardo Ambasciano

“Linnaeus gave us a way of talking about the diversity of grasses” (Jonathan Z. Smith in Sinhababu 2008). Title page of the 10th edition of Systema naturæ (1758) by Carl Linnaeus. Göttingen State and University Library, signature <8 H NAT I, 7105 <10>:1>. Source: Wikipedia.

In late 2018, less than a year after historian of religion extraordinaire Jonathan Z. Smith had passed away, I submitted an abstract to an interesting conference organized by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, entitled “When the Chips are Down,” It’s Time to Pick Them Up: Thinking With Jonathan Z. Smith. This post tentatively provides an account of what I might have come up with provided that my submission were accepted (which, alas, was not).

Follow the Money

November 28, 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano

*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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