LSE announces large DRH Grant
“This is a true humanities-science collaboration. The tool is a useful resource for humanities scholars - a qualitative and quantitative database of history. But for social scientists, it’s now one of (if not the) largest quantitative databases of history.”
London School of Economics press release, “The Database of Religious History receives grant from John Templeton Foundation”
The University of British Columbia: DRH Awarded Largest Humanities Grant
“UBC’s Database of Religious History (DRH) project has received the largest grant to date for a single research project in the humanities at UBC—$4.8 million from the John Templeton Foundation.
Led by Dr. Edward Slingerland and Dr. M. Willis Monroe, the project aims to democratize knowledge about religious history, enabling scholars of religion from around the world to share their expertise with a global audience by contributing to the free, searchable database. Each contribution in turn makes the database more useful—and reliable—for everyone.”
“Database of Religious History awarded largest grant for a UBC humanities research project,” The University of British Columbia, April 13, 2021.
Religious Studies News: big data approach to history
“While users can use the DRH similarly to an encyclopedia—that is, looking at individual entries—the database also reflects a Big Data approach to comparing and understanding large scale patterns or trends in the historical record.
Yes, although you can browse individual entries as in an encyclopedia, the DRH is actually a relational database with all of the powerful functionality that comes with the ability to manipulate data on a large scale. Answers to the various poll questions are ultimately grounded only in space and time, which allows users to analyze answers to specific questions within certain date ranges and geographical areas, to correlate answers with other types of geo-spacial data, or to visualize DRH data in a variety of ways.”
“Making Religious History Digitally Native,”Religious Studies News, March 2nd 2017
Science: People are nicer when god is watching
“People are nicer to each other when they think someone is watching, many psychology studies have shown—especially if they believe that someone has the power to punish them for transgressions even after they’re dead. That’s why some scientists think that belief in the high gods of moralizing religions, such as Islam and Christianity, helped people cooperate with each other and encouraged societies to grow. An innovative study of 96 societies in the Pacific now suggests that a culture might not need to believe in omniscient, moral gods in order to reap the benefits of religion in the form of political complexity. All they need is the threat of supernatural punishment, even if the deities in question don’t care about morality and act on personal whims, the new work concludes.”
Lizzie Wade, “To Foster complex Societies, Tell People a God is Watching,” Science, March 4th, 2015.
Science: The rise of moralistic religions
“Today’s most popular religions all have one thing in common: a focus on morality. But the gods didn’t always care whether you are a bad person. Researchers have long puzzled over when and why religions moved away from a singular focus on ritual and began to encourage traits such as self-discipline, restraint, and asceticism. Now, a new study proposes that the key to the rise of so-called moralizing religions was, of all things, more wealth.”
Lizzie Wade, “Wealth may have driven the rise of today’s religions,” Science, December 11th 2014.
The Guardian: Russell Brand on monkeys and inequality
“Edward Slingerland, a professor of ancient Chinese philosophy at Stanford University, demonstrated this instinct to me with the use of hazelnuts. As we spoke, there was a bowl of them on the table. “Russell,” he said, scooping up a handful, “we humans have an inbuilt tendency towards fairness. If offered an unfair deal, we will want to reject it. If I have a huge bowl of nuts and offer you just one or two, how do you feel?”
The answer was actually quite complex.”
Russell Brand, “What Monkeys and the Queen Taught Me about Inequality,” The Guardian, October 13th 2014.
The National Post: scientific ideas to “retire”
“Unlike rock stars, scientific ideas do not usually burn out. They fade away and outlast their usefulness.
This is what motivated a new survey of 166 scientists and intellectuals, asking which ideas ought to be “retired” from science, not quite because they are wrong, but because they are old and ineffective, like nature versus nurture, left-brain versus right-brain, or carbon footprints.”
Joesph Brean, “IQ, Big Bang, evolution on list of incomplete or outdated ideas scientists suggest are ready to be ‘retired’,” The National Post, January 14th 2014.
Edge: scientific morality is an idea ready to “retire”
“The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. ”
John Brockman, “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” Edge.org, January 1st 2014.
University Affairs: new project on religion and prosociality
“According to the project’s website, despite religion’s omnipresence and centrality to human affairs, it remains, from an academic viewpoint, one of the least studied and most poorly understood aspects of human behavior. “In the past, people have done big, sweeping historical cross-cultural projects. But they tended to generalize, and they were doing it all on their own,” says Edward Slingerland, principal investigator of the project and a professor of Asian studies at UBC. “The difference [here] is we’re doing it with a network of experts who are bringing a range of expertise and materials, and we’re putting it all together like a big puzzle.””
Diane Peters, “Does Religion Make Us Better?” University Affairs, November 6th 2013.
University of British Columbia: Religion is one of the least studied and most misunderstood aspects of human life
“Throughout the world, religion is one of the most central commonalities that humans share. Whether we choose to follow a religion or not, every culture has one if not many religions woven through everyday life. Considering the importance of religion in human social life, we should all have a very clear understanding of why it exists, but we don’t.
“Religion is one of the least studied and most misunderstood aspects of human life, despite its central role in society,” says UBC Faculty of Arts Professor Edward Slingerland.”
“Annual Report: Digging into Religion,” UBC Annual Report 2012-2013, July 1st 2013.