open source spirituality: turning the world upside down

Sermon preached at Boston University School of Theology during Wednesday Chapel on October 24, 2007

Turning the categories inside-out: Complex identifications and multiple interactions in religious ethnography

This paper challenges the fixed boundaries that ethnographers have often constructed between religious insiders and outsiders. Drawing on Neitz's observations, it argues that the main task of reflexive fieldwork is locating the self in relation to ambiguous and shifting boundaries. We offer a comparative analysis of the experiences of two differently socially located researchers to illustrate how religious identity emerges as a continuum, on which one's place is negotiated with one's research participants. We also examine the importance of intersecting multiple identities. Finally, the paper questions whether social identity categories are the primary way that we relate with our respondents. It explores the spiritual and emotional dimensions of research relationships and argues that these may transform, reinforce and generally interact with social identities. Comparing our experiences, we outline the consequences of these reflections for data gathering and analysis.

Spectrally bounded operators from von Neumann algebras

We prove that every unital spectrally bounded operator from a properly infinite von Neumann algebra onto a semisimple Banach algebra is a Jordan homomorphism.

Bounded Rationality and Repeated Network Formation

We define a finite-horizon repeated network formation game with consent and study the differences induced by two levels of individual rationality. Perfectly rational players will remain unconnected at the equilibrium, while nonempty equilibrium networks may form when players are assumed to behave as finite automata of limited complexity. We provide structural properties of the sequences of networks which are likely to form in Nash and subgame perfect Nash equilibria of the repeated game. For instance, players can form totally different connected networks at each period or the sequence of networks can exhibit a total order relationship.