A Yardstick That Fits Nothing: Max Weber and the Study of Religion
Verstehen licenses interpretation as rigor and the ideal type turns it into an instrument, a deliberately unreal construct you hold real cases against to see how each one diverges.
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Browse page 4 of Adam DJ Brett's blog archive with posts on web development, digital publishing, teaching, and project updates.
Archaeology, Not Shopping: How to Map What Practitioners Actually Do
A method for reading a professional field: search past the databases, sort what you find into three bins, and name the silence precisely.
The Prayer Book That Stays Closed: Lived Religion and the Practice Nobody Wrote Down
Orsi, Hall, McGuire, and Ammerman moved the study of religion from the pulpit to the kitchen table, and left a method for seeing the practice your manual cannot describe.
Cards on the Factory Floor: Kanban for Dissertation and Journal Article Writing
How a signaling system from Toyota’s assembly lines became a workable method for finishing an 80,000-word dissertation one card at a time.
From Recognition to Jurisdiction: Indigenous Studies from Haudenosaunee Country to Aotearoa
Indigenous studies is not one canon but many place-based traditions, and its central question is not inclusion but who holds authority over land, law, and data.
In Praise of Zotero: The One Hill I Will Die On in Research Workflow
Why a free, open reference manager is the single tool most likely to save a doctoral project, and what its unpolished interface is quietly buying you.
There Is No Neutral Map: Humanities Theory as a Foundation for Method
Anderson and During recast theory as a set of reading practices rather than a doctrine, which turns the ordinary work of sorting a field into an argument you have to defend.
The Master Who Knew No Flemish: How Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster Works
Joseph Jacotot taught French he could not explain, and Jacques Rancière turned the accident into an argument about what every explanation assumes before it begins.
The Unforced Force: Habermas and How Best Practice Gets Settled
Jürgen Habermas separates practice argued out among practitioners from practice handed down by money or command, and leaves behind a portable audit for telling the two apart.
Lessons Without a Syllabus: Henry Giroux, Public Pedagogy, and Democracy
Giroux moves pedagogy out of the classroom and into film, policy, and platforms, and then the question becomes which institution teaches your field its common sense.
There and Back Again: Why the Journey into Theory Only Counts If You Come Home
Theory is never the destination for a scholar-practitioner; the rhythm is praxis, theory, praxis, and the test at the end is the question a friend asks over coffee.
A Good Idea Gathering Dust: From Named Gap to Workable Innovation
Three lenses on innovation (diffusion, encoding, leading change), one philosophical move underneath them, and two tests any proposal has to survive.