Data Check

In this episode, Maxinne Connolly-Panagopoulus discusses the range of Dr. Carmen Celestini's work on religious conspiracy theories, Christian apocalyptic thought its impacts on the American political system. and tracks some of the parallels between early and modern conspiracy theories. They cover early grassroots movements such as the Anti-Masonic Party and the Know Nothings, who sought to fight against what they perceived as a threat to Christian values from a New World Order. This is paralleled to QAnon and current theories which hold a similar distrust of the government, the media and beliefs of a Satanic New World Order. We then move to discuss The John Birch Society and how their form of improvisational conspiracism linked to contemporary right-wing mobilisation and the Christian Identity Organisation. Threaded throughout our discussion, we ask explore the motivations for joining such a movement and what keeps people there despite moving targets and failed prophecies. Finally, Carmen describes the state of the field of conspiracy movements today, and where she sees it going in the future.

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In the first Discourse! episode of the new season, RSP co-founder David Robertson is joined by Ting Guo and Jacob Barrett to discuss three stories in which classification matters. In the first, they look at the recent New York Times article which asks explicitly, "What counts as religion?" when it comes to vaccine resistance. In the second, they discuss how religious groups from conservative Jews to the Satanic Temple are challenging Texas' abortion ban. In the third, they discuss how the image of Muslim women and the supposed religious nature of misogyny and authoritarianism plays into how states like Afghanistan are portrayed and managed by European and American powers.

Related Resources

• "Vaccine Resisters Seek Religious Exemptions, But What Counts as Religious?"
• "Why the Satanic Temple Backs Big Abortion"
• "Texas' Abortion Ban Is Against My Religion. As A Rabbi, I will Defy It if Necessary"
• "Revisiting Aisha"
• "Explainer: How Dangerous Is Afghanistan's Islamic State?"
• "Afghanistan | 'Most of the women who wear the hijab are not oppressed': Boushra Almutawakel, author of the image that went viral after the Taliban's irruption"
• Do Muslim Women Need Saving? - Lila Abu-Lughod
• Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report - Saba Mahmood

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In this episode, Dr. Mitsutoshi Horii joins RSP co-editor Andie Alexander to discuss his recent book The Category of 'Religion' in Contemporary Japan: Shūkyō & Temple Buddhism (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). What is 'religion'? How and when did this term emerge in contemporary Japan? Tune in to learn more about how the classification of Temple Buddhism as religion is used in political, legal, and commercial contexts.

In this episode, Dan Gorman speaks with Christopher Cantwell and Kristian Petersen about their anthology Digital Humanities and Research Methods in Religious Studies (2021), which is part of DeGruyter's "Introductions to Digital Humanities—Religion" series. They discuss the ethics and management of ongoing Digital Humanities projects, the opportunities afforded by mapping technology for understanding religious life, and the question of whether digital projects are recognized as genuine scholarship.

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With over 350 episodes in our archives, we've seen many scholars discuss the issue of fieldwork and how their research goals have been modified by their time in the field. Today's special episode featured clips from seven recent interviews with brief comments by Dave McConeghy. This "remix" is our first attempt to try to bring greater attention to the many different ways our podcast can be used in the classroom. We hope these clips might support a discussion of how fieldwork changes scholars and their scholarship. If you'd like to see more episodes highlighting past interviews to support specific research questions or pedagogical issues in the study of religion, please let us know by reaching out to one of our social media channels such as our Twitter or Instagram.

On this month's Discourse!, join Emily D. Crews, Alison Robertson, and host Theo Wildcroft for a collection of topical stories on how religion mediates how the state treats human bodies in different ways. They discuss debates over the presence of pastors in executions in Texas, how the secularist French state is reacting to the abuse revelations in the Catholic Church, and the role of religion in legal arguments over the ownership of a site sacred to a Los Angeles Apache community. Oh - and Jesusween!

Related Links

• On Death Row in Texas, a Last Request: A Prayer and ‘Human Contact’

• Supreme Court Stays Execution in Dispute Over Pastor’s Role in Death Chamber

• Catholic priests in France ‘must report abuse allegations heard in confession’

• In Los Angeles, spiritual convoy urges unity to preserve Apache sacred site Oak Flat

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In this episode, Dr. Craig Martin joins Savannah Finver to discuss his forthcoming book, Discourse and Ideology: A Critique of the Study of Culture. Dr. Martin shares with us his motivations for writing this book, describes his primary methodologies and the key concepts he introduces in the text, and explains some of his thoughts on the utility of religion as a category of analysis in religious studies scholarship. Can discourse analysis and ideology critique be done together successfully? What can these methods reveal to us about power relations of domination and subordination in societies? Why is poststructuralism so important to the study of religion, and what do we miss if we don't attend carefully to the writings of key thinkers such as GWF Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Jacques Derrida? Tune in to find out!

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Christianity is one of the most ubiquitous religions in the world. In reality, it would be more plausible to rather speak about Christianities given the wide variety that can be found adapted to different contexts, languages, and histories. In this sense, its own internal diversity makes it most pervasive and enduring despite the passage of time or cultural boundaries. But it is worth asking, what happens when Christians from different sides of the world, apparently, meet each other for the first time?

In this week’s episode, RSP associate editor Sidney Castillo talks with Dr. István Perczel who presents a highly detailed history of the Saint Thomas Christians (or Syrian Christians) of Kerala, a religious group that has been present in Southwestern India since late antiquity. His discovery of a corpus of Syriac manuscripts from their archives in 1998, has allowed for a turning point in the current understanding of the colonial relations, religious disputes, and overall historiography of the region.

One of the takeaways of the episode is how the discovery of new sources allows for further outline the cultural environment in which such texts are produced. Among the many sources, some of them refer to theological debates regarding mystical conceptions of God, and which were translated and re-read from Syriac, to Malayalam, and to Latin. The translation avatars of these documents, and the discussions that arose from figures such as Jesuit priest Francisco Roz, and Nestorian priest Mar Abraham, show the dynamism of the Syrian Christian community during the early modern period. Such “cultural wars” and disputes for truth narratives are certainly no strange to us in our present time, especially when looking at them through the lens of colonialism, political polarization, or cultural appropriation.

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What do we mean when we talk about secularism, religion, or culture? In this episode, Matt Sheedy joins RSP co-editor Andie Alexander to discuss his recent book Owning the Secular: Religious Symbols, Culture Wars, Western Fragility (Routledge, 2021). Sheedy discusses how "religion" and "secular" categories are necessarily intertwined as he considers the ways in which those categories are contested in the public sphere—particularly with regard to Islam and gender in the post-9/11 era.

What is the world religions paradigm? In this RSP Remix, David McConeghy presents an abridged version of David Robertson's 2013 interview with James Cox. Cox explains how the world religions paradigm came to be the dominant model for teaching undergraduates comparative religion, and he offers an introduction to a few of the strongest critique of this model. These critiques include the paradigm's essentialism as well as its emergence as a tool of colonialism and imperialism. Reducing the original episode to 20 minutes presents a great opportunity for this conversation to be employed in more classrooms. If you would like to see other RSP Remixes on specific topics or questions, reach out to us on our social media accounts and let us know!