Sunday, February 24, 2013

Building Religions 32: Michel Foucault


There is nothing overtly religious about Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It's primarily a history of penal systems, but although its focus is almost entirely secular, it enjoys some popularity among scholars of religion for the theories that he develops out of that history. Foucault's larger body of work does address religion more specifically (there's even a collection of his essays on the subject), but here, I would like to look at this one book as an example of how tangentially-connected material can inspire new ideas for worldbuilding.