Religion, COVID-19, and Biocultural Evolution – JSRNC Special Issue Published!

I’ve been meaning to post my newest article for a few weeks now and keep forgetting to do it, so here it finally is. This article in the JSRNC (16.1, 2022) is based on one area of current research I’ve been delving into for about 3 years now. It actually began before the Covid-19 pandemic started, when I was teaching Religious Studies courses at CSU Chico on the ‘End of the World,’ but this specific article is more deeply tied up with the last 2 years of the global pandemic, which, after all, is what led to the initial CFP for a special issue of the JSRNC on Religion and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The whole special issue has a lot of fascinating articles in it, and I’m glad I had the chance to work on it. It was also a great learning experience in the nuts and bolts of pulling together a special issue for an academic journal. The introduction piece I co-authored with Bron Taylor is titled “Religion, COVID-19, and Biocultural Evolution” and can be found here.

Here’s a teaser from the opening section:

As this special issue goes to press we are entering a third year of the coronavirus pandemic, with global deaths at 5.4 million and rising (COVID-19 Dashboard 2021).1 A February 2021 Pew Research Center poll asking people what they think life will be like in 2025 captured the current zeitgeist: ‘A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak’ (Anderson, Rainie, and Vogels 2021). The Global State of Democracy in 2021 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) similarly warned that democracies around the world are facing ‘a perfect storm of threats, both from within and from a rising tide of authoritarianism’ (2021: vii). In 2021, three broad responses to the pandemic—acceptance, skepticism, and denial—played important roles. And in all these trends religion was entangled deeply with the virus and the diverse cultural responses to it around the world.

I delved into many of these topics in my spring 2022 Global Studies Seminar public talk, which you can watch below.