Sovereignty and Spiritual Warfare
Join Savannah H. Finver and Dr. S. Jonathon O’Donnell as they talk demons, American politics, interdisciplinary methodologies, and the critical study of religion.
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Our June episode of Discourse! is the final episode of Season 10! Wow! It’s been a fantastic season, and we are so grateful for your support. For our final episode, Andie Alexander, Ishanika Sharma, and K. Merinda Simmons decided to dive into the current discourses on Critical Race Theory! After defining Critical Race Theory (CRT) and outlining a brief history of its emergence, they dive into some recent examples of how popular conceptions of CRT (contrary to the intersectional aims of CRT discourses) reify the dichotomy between individualism and structuralism. They discuss the recent Georgia and Alabama education resolutions, discourses around India’s caste system, the emergence and role of the Religious Right in America, and conclude with controversy around The 1619 Project. There’s far more to say but only so much time in an episode!
Join Savannah H. Finver and Dr. S. Jonathon O’Donnell as they talk demons, American politics, interdisciplinary methodologies, and the critical study of religion.
In this episode, Boris Briones talks with Sidney Castillo on his comparative research of the Mapuche and Selk’nam of austral South America. Check it out to learn a thing or two about ethnohistory and scientific divulgation!
Is the Islamic state simply a reaction against the modern secular nation-state, or is there more to it? Join us as Noah Salomon answers this question among many more as he talks about his book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State.
It’s a bumper episode of Discourse this month, as four (count them, four!) RSP editors sit down to discuss how the media are talking about religion this month. First, Breann, David, and Dave introduce Andie as the RSP’s new Managing Editor, before we discuss mass COVID cremations in India, a new synagogue at the site of a Nazi massacre in the Ukraine, protests over a new telescope in Hawaiʻi, and the scandal over the remains of the victims of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. It’s not our most lighthearted episode.
In this response, Joel Bordeaux notes that Ellen Gough’s focus on the ritual components and “tantricization” of Jain ascetic practices offers a new way of thinking through and contextualizing the “notoriously slippery notion of Tantra” in the subcontinent.
Raymond Haberski, Jr. writes that our interview with Ronit Stahl about Military chaplaincy “provides a nuanced picture of pluralism” in the United States. This reveals how massive institutions like the U.S. military operationalize pluralism to “both incorporate difference and flatten distinctions.”
“The story that Dr. Gough is telling about the development of Jain tantra—the Jain adoption of mantra-practice, but rejection of antinomianism—thus seems to me to be a fundamentally noteworthy case-study,” writes Anne Mocko on our interview with Ellen Gough discussing the ‘tantricization’ of Jain ascetic rituals.
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