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I released an album this week. It’s not a new album; it was recorded quite a few years ago, but I never released it at the time. I’m not really sure why—partly, I think, because it is in such a different style from everything else I’ve done, but also because I didn’t know what to…
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The post reflects on encounters with contemporary esoteric figures, linking personal experiences to the deaths of Stephan Hoeller and David Wilcock. It analyses Wilcock’s trajectory from New Age spirituality to conspiracism, arguing that his career exemplifies patterns of epistemic authority, prophetic failure, and ideological drift outlined in the author’s previous work.
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The unsealed Epstein files contain horrific real evidence of exploitation, but also fantastical “Satanic” claims that echo the Satanic Ritual Abuse panics of the ’80s/’90s. We need to separate documented facts from dreamlike, unreliable testimony so the genuine crimes of the powerful aren’t buried in noise. Epstein wasn’t a Satanist, but invoking the supernatural only…
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Here’s a video of the presentation I gave at the INFORM conference, “Public Health After COVID: beliefs, religion and competing epistemologies”, which took place on 26-27 May 2023, King’s College London, and was organised by my colleagues Suzanne Newcombe and Karen O’Brien-Kop. I look at a number of historical vaccination programmes to show how the responses frequently…
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I was delighted to be invited to take part in this panel on Christian Far-Right Extremism last year, and I can finally share the recording of the panel. Details below. Thanks to Paul Hedges for inviting me.
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In case you missed it, here’s a piece I wrote recently for the Open University on the results of the 2021 census findings on religion in the UK. My takeaway: this was all completely predictable. Perhaps the most likely factor, however, is simply that the default option has changed. Whereas only two decades ago, three-quarters…
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Guest Lecture for University College Cork’s Research Seminar Series (thanks to Jenny Butler for inviting me!). What if, instead of looking at Gnosticism as a historical religion or a perennial religious style, we instead look at it as a way of thinking about religion – a discourse on religious knowledge that changes over time, and…
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Popular communication: The international journal of media and culture Guest Editors: Katja Valaskivi (University of Helsinki, Finland), David G. Robertson (The Open University, UK) & Patrick Burkart (Texas A&M University, USA) June 21, 2021 The aim of this special issue is to explore how a multiplicity of competing epistemologies interact and compete in the “post-Truth”…
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Because conspiracy theories suddenly a hot topic once again – and especially their links to religion and especially New Age religions – I have a few speaking engagements coming up. On Friday 26th February, I’m talking about “Conspiracy Theories and New Age Spiritualities” at the Open Div Summit, a 4-day “pod-conference” around spirituality, meaning, and connection in…
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Here’s a piece I published early this year on the Open University’s blog. It connects the challenges to the restoration to a cottage in the Highlands of Scotland to the storming of the US Capitol Building on Jan 6th 2021 – both expressions of the same fear of non-existent Luciferian ritual child abusers. large numbers…
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David G. Robertson