In Joseph L. Tucker Edmond’s response to our interview with Richard Newton, we see a continuation of the extended, organic metaphors of Newton’s scriptural lens for studying Alex Haley’s Roots. What does it mean to tend a future, asks Tucker Edmonds, and who tends the futures for Black subjects?
Restoring marginalized voices to the scholarship on religion and ecology is essential decolonial praxis, writes Amanda J. Baugh in this response to our episode with Gretel Van Wieren on “Climate Change(s).”
How can Jewish Studies help us rethink concepts like “the political”? In this response to our episode featuring Carsten Wilke interviewed by Sidney Castillo, Jonathan Garb highlights additional aspects of “the rise of kabbalah as a potent cultural force in the early modern period” that challenge the limits of cross-cultural comparison.
What are the limits of scripture as a performative concept? In this response to this season’s episode with Richard Newton, M. Cooper Harriss examines Newton’s hybrid understanding of scripture as a forceful and malleable process of signification.
How will excluded, “interested” voices return to the academy through decolonization? Find out in this response to our interview with Natalie Avalos by Eleanor Tiplady Higgs.
Recognizing the influence of “Christian colonialist attitudes” on scholarly discourses about the value of sacred objects means understanding how we are all implicated by our field’s ongoing use of the term “fetish.”
Echoing the lessons from Breann Fallon’s interview with Prof. J. Lorand Matory, respondent Colby Dickinson calls us to account for the ways in which “we are all hypocritical in our assigning of values to certain things and downplaying the value in other things.” This includes, he writes, the theories of fetishism by Marx and Freud to which our field seems inescapably connected.
Get a global perspective on the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), whose Australian branches were discussed in our recent episode with Dr. Kathleen Openshaw.
Describing the UCKG as a leader in a global Pentecostal vanguard influencing the Catholic Church, respondents Professor Andrew Chesnut and Dr. Kate Kingsbury outline how the UCKG’s focus on health, wealth, and spiritual warfare have been critical to its success with migrants in Australian and around the world.
Elaine Lai’s response to our roundtable on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Buddhist Ritual highlights the advantages of working across disciplines. In sum, Lai argues, this roundtable and all such interdisciplinary collaborations remind us of how embedded and contingent our terms can be. Those differences matter, especially as we work to decolonize the academy and democratize access to its efforts, for we must “remember that we are all first and foremost human… and it’s time to show up for one another with care,” she concludes.
Might books be a “space” like Museums for the sacred-secular work of Holocaust remembrance? In this response by Samuel J. Spinner to our season 9 episode with Avril Alba, stories take center stage as examples of “cultural innovation necessitated by catastrophe and catalyzed by a reworking of the relationship between people and texts.”
What are the challenges for departments and universities as they teach Native American Studies using Community-Based Service Learning models? In this response by Lisa Poirier, we learn that the efforts to decolonize our curricula require not only new critical theorists, but a suffusing commitment to decolonization as transformation in what Natalie Avalos described as “a process of becoming.”
Decolonization requires changing the politics of academia’s knowledge production, argues Tyler M. Tully in this response to Episode 337: Decolonizing the Study of Religion with Malory Nye.
Writing about universalism in NDEs, Natasha Tassell-Matuma explains that “Languages reflect the cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies underlying cultures and are mutually constitutive in a culture’s practices, beliefs, ideologies, and norms. As such, when people speak, they are essentially drawing on a collective legacy that speaks to the socially-sanctioned worldview of the culture they affiliate with.”
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