iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Bilingual packaging on these single use plastics got me thinking about @amitav.bsky.social

Picture of a box of ziploc bags called in French “sacs de rangement”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

The Queen of Outer Space (1958)

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

My own contribution is a 'natural history' of the origins of religious studies, not as an academic area of interest, but as a institutionalized field in America's public university system. 4/4 doi.org/10.1163/1570...

This article develops a ‘natural history’ of the study of religion at public universities in the United States and links the 1960s proliferation of programs and departments in religious studies to Cold War era investments in expanding higher education. This material and institutional reframing of the origins of the field suggests new ways to respond to the ongoing pressures of neoliberalism, austerity, and politically motivated attacks on humanistic fields of inquiry like religious studies.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The special issue of Method and Theory in the Study of Religion focused on "Deserting the Study of Religion" (edited by yours truly) is now available online. 1/4 brill.com/view/journal...

This special issue is structured around the theme “Deserting the Study of Religion,” which signals the precarity facing public universities and aims to historicize its causes, identify the institutional challenges specific to the study of religion, and gather reflections on how scholars can respond to these in their research, teaching, and leadership. What does it mean to study religion within the infrastructures of public higher educational institutions? What does it mean to teach and research in particular places, each of them with unique cultural, demographic, economic, and ecological contexts? How might these questions reframe or refresh longstanding conversations about theory and method in the study of religion?

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Post something random or you’ll have an awful September

Seafood counter sign that reads Krabby cakes

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Re-reading this article from a couple of years ago to make sure it was relevant enough to assign for a class reading. Unfortunately, yes, "petro-religious nationalisms" is still a useful way of thinking about contemporary politics. online.ucpress.edu/currenthisto...

Image of text that reads: he configuration and internal mechanics of petro-religious nationalism differ across political contexts, but in all of these cases there is direct and ongoing cooperation among fossil fuel corpora- tions, religious conservatives, and xenophobic nationalists. Looming anxieties about immigration cannot be detached from the environmental fac- tors driving migration flows; revanchist support for fossil fuels cannot be analyzed apart from nostalgia for (racialized and gendered forms of) manufacturing-based economic prosperity. Nor can the ideological coherence of these views be adequately appreciated in a secular register. It is reductive to claim that political entities are merely “using” religion to advance economic or ideological interests.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Timeline cleanse: happy national chihuahua day to those who celebrate!

A Chihuahua and terrier mutt chilling by some cacti

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

I remain convinced that there is no way to talk about fossil fuels without talking about religion:

Image of text that reads: “having one of those deeply suburban metaphysical trips where you realize that everything is connected. What’s happening at the gas pumps is a component of almost everything we manufacture, do, produce, package and transport. The Revelation of St. John the Dad, if you will.”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Worth noting that alongside the establishmentarian funny business at the pentagon, this was on the DHS Instagram feed yesterday

Screenshot of a social media post with a renaissance (?) painting of the cruxifixction with Luke 23:46 superimposed over the image. Below the image, DHS social media hacks have included the phrase “trust in god’s plan,” just to make sure that Good Friday is presented as QAnon adjacent.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

If it weren't bad enough that we've reverted to pre-Voting Rights Act levels of democratic wellbeing, look at how we compare to this set of autocracies:

The V-Dem report also notes this remarkable finding that puts the U.S. democratic backsliding into international context: “The dramatic decline under Donald Trump took Hungary’s Viktor Orbán over four years, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić eight years, and both India’s Narendra Modi and Türkiye’s Rečep Tayyip Erdoğan about a decade.”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

This picture goes hard. Unions are essential to the work of building a future that prioritizes human needs, not digital extractivism. @campusworkers.bsky.social

Protestors from Memphis in 1991 carrying signs that read “stop the robot invasion”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Very fortunate to have Scott Warren visiting my Religious Freedom class today, where we are joined by students from a separate course on the US/Mexico Borderlands. Warren is also speaking @asu-csrc.bsky.social later today (details below).

Compassion Beyond Borders: Spirituality, Migration and Moral Courage in Public Life
Speaker: Scott Warren, geographer and humanitarian aid volunteer
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
3-4:30 p.m. MST

Drawing on his experience as a humanitarian aid volunteer, educator and defendant in a landmark religious freedom case, Warren reflects on what it means to act with compassion when moral conviction collides with state power. Warren will explore how spirituality—beyond formal religious affiliation—can compel acts of care for migrants in the borderlands and beyond, and how humanitarian acts can be criminalized, contested and defended in federal court. This lecture invites the community to consider migration, law and humanitarian aid through the lens of moral courage and to grapple with what our deepest values demand in moments of human suffering and political conflict.

Held in partnership with the Civil Rights, Migration and Workplace Law Initiative at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law; Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies; School of Transborder Studies; School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning; Committee for Strategic Charter Initiatives in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change; and No More Deaths at ASU.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

why ever show any photo of her ever again other than from this scene? it's her legacy and trump's.

former HHS secretary Kristi Noem standing in front of a prison cell crowded with inmates in El Salvador, where she helped facilitate the deportation of migrants to a gulag

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

The lede makes it sound like there are upsides to the ban on race based admissions. But the article goes on to detail the problems described in this study: lower rates of students of color in high earning professions, lower rates of college degrees for students of color not in the top tier.

Text of NYT headline and lede:

Colleges See Major Racial Shifts in Student Enrollment

An analysis finds that flagship state universities, as well as less selective colleges, had major increases in Black and Hispanic students following a ban on race-conscious admissions.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

CFP for the @aarweb.bsky.social "Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar" #AAR2026. We invite proposals on: 1) futures of (and beyond) extractivism 2) critical engagement with religion, energy and extraction in classrooms and campuses papers.aarweb.org/sites/defaul...

In the fifth and final year of the Energy, Extraction, and Religion Seminar, we invite
proposals on futures of (and beyond) extractivism.
We envision one session as a summative and reflective conversation about the Energy,
Extraction, and Religion Seminar. In particular, we invite proposals concentrated on
futures beyond extractivism. In so doing, we will take the risk of posing the utopian (or
heterotopian) question: what would it mean to think and live beyond extractivism? What
would this look like in the study of religion? As Lauren Berlant emphasizes, “to see like a
heterotopian is to attend to and elaborate a loose assemblage of emergent lifeworlds”
(2020, 14). Where are such emergent lifeworlds materializing? How might they be
cultivated? What role might religious practices, cosmologies, lifeways, ceremonies, or
theologies play in cultivating such futures?
Our second session will also emphasize counter-extractivist futures, but with a focus on
pedagogy, curricula, and higher education. We invite proposals describing the
implications of a turn toward critical engagement with religion, energy and extraction in
classrooms and university settings more broadly. How should the insights and theories
from this seminar and this transdisciplinary array of fields be incorporated into religious
studies and theology courses? How should a refusal of extractivism change our methods
of teaching and mentoring? Reflecting beyond our role(s) as individual scholars, how
does attention to the nexus of energy, extraction, and religion facilitate broader efforts
to rethink and reimagine higher education?

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

👀 www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Congratulations to Dr. Mario Orospe Hernandez, who yesterday successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Mattering Technologies. Secular/Religious Borders in Bolivian Lithium Mining” at Arizona State University

Pictured are four people smiling for the camera

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

Saw and spoke to the qanon shaman, who came and interacted with our group. His sign was a demand that the Epstein files be released. #NoKings

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

Went to #NoKings PHX with fellow members of @ucwarizona.bsky.social Good turnout, lots of righteous anger.

Crowd picture of protestors with palm trees and signs

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Arizona prepares for climate change TLDR: adaptation without mitigation because “politics” www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

“Hobbs' heat plan has won praise and led to actions in some parts of the state. Her advisors say they didn't want her work to get lost in political debates about climate change.

In 2012, Arizona recorded 156 heat-related deaths across the state. A decade and a nearly three-degree increase in average July temperatures in its largest city later, the death count had swelled to 671.”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

This is why we must organize around boards of regents/trustees. They are unelected and are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of higher educational institutions.

Image of text: “Abbott cannot fire university presidents, but he appoints the members of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, who do have that authority.”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

www.texastribune.org/2025/09/18/t...

A picture of a public shaming from China’s Cultural Revolution; a man wears a sign around his neck and hangs his head while students point and shout.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Another important point: assessing programs by counting majors is, by design, a measure meant to undermine humanities programs. We need to find other, better ways of demonstrating to administrators and publics the value of religious studies classes. 4/4

Counting majors does not reflect the value religious studies brings to a college, its proponents and practitioners say. Courses in religion are popular among undergraduates because they learn, often for the first time, about religion as something to study rather than to practice. Now that is more important than ever, some in the discipline say.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

An important point to highlight: Religious Studies is "cross-pressured," by people who don't think religion is important and by people who confuse religious studies with religious practice--two wrongheaded ideas about why ours is not a "real" academic field. 3/4

There are also misconceptions about what religious-studies courses teach. “I get multiple reactions to what I do,” said Shaily Patel, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. “One is, Oh you’re teaching people theology, which is not what I do. The other is, That’s not a thing that’s worth learning about, because people perceive religion to be esoteric.”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

One fundamentally important connection between Oprah and her protégés (“doctors” Phil and Oz) is that they all fuse New Thought with neoliberalism. They all, Oprah included, hold that health & wealth are achieved through the will, and that sickness & poverty are about being weak-willed.

Photo of Dr. Phil, tv show host turned right wing cheerleader

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Someone should write a book about how (white) American ways of interacting with nature are steeped in a hyper-individualistic Protestantism. www.ucpress.edu/books/devote...

Screenshot of a quote from the article about “creation”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

I take some issue with the term "fetish," but still, just look at this picture from the lobby of a megachurch in Midland, Texas.

Coffee shop in a megachurch lobby branded to look like a filling station.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Different artist, same city, same message

Picture of a building next to a freeway wi th graffiti that reads “fuck ice”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Learning from @amanda-m-nichols.bsky.social about the temporal, eschatological, and cultural histories and futures of nuclear technologies at #ISSRNC2025 @issrnc.bsky.social

Three speakers looking at a screen with a map of the United States showing the spread of radioactive particles from the testing of nuclear weapons (1945-1962)

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

For real, my first thought when I saw this thumbnail was “I don’t even recognize the cast of SNL anymore.” Like no joke I thought there was no way this wasn’t a sketch.

Five chuckleheads in the White House briefing room.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

“If your number one goal is for children to grow up to pay taxes, maybe you don’t care that much about children after all.” From @lagunavintage.bsky.social

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Contact information for the El Salvadoran embassy and consulates in the US.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The #HandsOff Phoenix protest was well attended and energetic. People see the connections between the attack on education and the attack on immigrants, they understand the link between cuts to healthcare and tax cuts for billionaires. And they’re pissed.

A large crowd of people holding signs and flags, facing away towards a speaker

A crowd holding signs, one of which says “Putin’s puppet”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Post a ship that’s not Star Wars or Star Trek

The mining vessel from the tv show red dwarf, which is very large and red

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

When things get really awful, do you ever wish someone would just organize a combination pizza party / cremation seminar? Well, you’re in luck.

Image of a flyer for a “free seminar and meal” at round table pizza organized and sponsored by a cremation company. Menu options are provided.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Also, this CFP for the religion and economy unit looks really interesting papers.aarweb.org/sites/defaul...

Text based image, available at the url in the post

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Jessica Beaudette, a PhD candidate in religious studies at ASU, just published an article related to her dissertation research: "Relational Conservation: Undisciplining Community-Based Fieldwork in the Okavango Delta, Botswana." It's been a positive experience to watch her project unfold!

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

bsky roast is just AI generated smoke up your skirt. I like myself just fine, being told to like myself feels like exploitation.

“Witty socio-political commentary”
“Passionate environmental advocate”
“Knowledgeable about religious studies”

“A whirlwind of thought, wit, and social justice all grounded with a hint of grumpiness”

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

The @issrnc.bsky.social reception also included a presentation of Amanda Baugh’s new book “Falling in Love with Nature: the values of Latinx Environmentalism” and Terra Rowe and Joerg Reiger’s new volume “Liberating People, Planet, and Religion”

Picture of Reiger & Rowe in front of a screen depicting the uneven distribution of warming associated with climate change.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

At AAR Annual Meetings, the @issrnc.bsky.social hosts a gathering that combines social gathering and academic conversation. This year, we celebrated the lives of Forrest Clingerman and Ellen Bernstein.

Picture of speakers in front of a screen showing pictures of two people, Ellen Bernstein and Forrest Clingerman.

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy…

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Evan Berry @ecothought.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Quote a rap album with zero skips.

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