Exploring contemporary issues in the
academic study of religion through podcasts.
The Religious Studies Project is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organization (SCIO) devoted to producing engaging and accessible resources for the contemporary study of religion.
Since 2012, our weekly podcast and written response essays have featured hundreds of scholars sharing their research and expertise in religious studies.
Area studies often are defined by their object of inquiry in substantive terms: the study of a more or less defined set of cultural characteristics or civilizations encompassed in a historical, geographical, or linguistic horizon. Among these, one of the area studies that first emerged was Jewish studies, which focuses on the study of Judaism and Jewish communities throughout the world in different historical times. And while it is certainly important to study Jewish history on its own terms, this can hardly be done without observing the cultural context in which that history developed and took form.
In this week’s podcast, Dr. Carsten Wilke talks to Sidney Castillo about the different processes that Judaism and Jewish identities underwent throughout modern European history. Wilke first briefly presents the scope of research of Jewish studies and then outlines how Jewish identity, belief, and community have been shaped by elements of local culture in Europe and beyond.
To further delve into this relationship, Wilke discusses the topic of his presentation at the international conference “Imperial Mysticisms: Piety and Power in Early Modern Empires from a Global Perspective” held at Central European University last November 2019. There he analyzed how the spread and development of modern Kabbalah corresponded with the migration of Sephardic Jews from Iberian empires (Portuguese and Spanish) to Ottoman Palestine.
No doubt this podcast will spark interest in those who are studying/researching in area studies, mysticism, or early modern history, and are actively looking for ways of problematizing their own scope of research.
How are Brazil and Australia connected by global flows of Pentecostalism? In this episode, Dr. Cristina Rocha shares her work on transnational Christian communities in Australia.
What would a post-humanist model of religious and social worlds look like? Paul-Francois Tremlett tells David G. Robertson about a new approach which prioritises flow and transformation.
In this episode we discuss Elizabeth Perez’s award-winning book *Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions*. Listen in to learn more about how religious subjectivity is constructed around the process of preparing ritual meals in the Lucumí tradition.
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.
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The views expressed in podcasts, features and responses are the views of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Religious Studies Project or our sponsors. The Religious Studies Project is produced by the Religious Studies Project Association (SCIO), a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (charity number SC047750).
