The Religious Studies Project Master Archive

What is curanderismo and where is it practiced? How does it connect to the borderlands? Is it a “folk” religion, and what exactly does that mean? For our first episode on curanderismo, RSP co-editor Andie Alexander is joined by Brett Hendrickson, Jennifer Koshatka Seman, and RSP Features editor, Israel Domínguez. In this discussion, we explore issues of power, identity, historical narrative, cultural contact, race, and much more. Be sure to tune in!

In this month’s Discourse!, Sidney Castillo is joined by Chris Cotter and Sierra Lawson to discuss the contemporary localized manifestations of Easter and Passover celebrations, a current US Supreme Court Case relating to the First Amendment, and the entanglement of Catholicism and national identity in television’s “Derry Girls”.

Watch the video episode here

Articles Discussed

• “Semana Santa en América Latina: religión y tradición“
• “Easter Celebrations Peruvian Style“
• “Catholic Traditions of Holy Week and Easter in Latin America“
• “‘Blackness Deserves a Seat at the Seder’“
• “Black Jews Get a Spotlight at the Seder“
• “U.S. Supreme Court taking on case of high school football coach fighting for right to pray on 50-yard line“
• “Language in Derry Girls was atrocious yet we just accept it as comedy“
• “Derry Girls creator explains why Spice Girls Union Jack dress was missing from latest episode“

In this episode, Dan Gorman and Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm follow up on their 2018 conversation for the RSP. The topic is Storm’s book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Storm shifts away from the deconstructive and genealogical approach to religion that he pursued in his earlier books The Invention of Religion in Japan and The Myth of Disenchantment. Although Storm finds great value in the critical theories known in the United States as “postmodernism,” he is concerned that postmodernism has led to an intellectual dead end. Humanities scholars can get caught in an infinite cycle of questioning the assumptions of their academic fields. Knowing anything with any degree of certainty seems impossible. Storm argues that scholars should engage in self-reflection and critique, but they must not give up on the pursuit of knowledge. We can learn about the world, even if our subjectivity and the limits of language prevent us from achieving truly objective knowledge. This metamodern mentality balances critique with investigation, emphasizes the process of knowledge-making over static categories or terms, encourages a healthy but moderate skepticism (Zeteticism), and situates human-made signs as part of the larger natural world (hylosemiotics). Join the RSP on a journey down the philosophical rabbit hole.

The musical excerpt at the beginning of the episode is from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. The song, “Move On”, is performed by Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal (2017 Broadway Cast Recording). ℗ 2017 Arts Music.

J. Brent Crosson joins the RSP to discuss his most recent award-winning book, Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad (Chicago, 2020). Based on more than a decade of fieldwork during and after Trinidad declared a state of emergency in 2011, Crosson explores how religion in Trinidad took to the streets to demand justice in the face of brutal governmental crackdowns against protestors crying out against rampant police brutality. Many marching the streets believed that if the legal justice system could not deliver justice for those wrongfully killed by the police, then perhaps obeah could. Using Trinidadian spiritual workers’ own descriptions of their religious practice—obeah—as “science” and “experiments with power,” Crosson examines how these spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion.

The construction of the introductory textbook in the academic study of religion is an incredibly fraught enterprise. What will you include? What will you exclude? What organizing rubrics will you have in mind? Which voices will you highlight and who will be excluded? And particularly in our contemporary world, where attention spans are short and so many resources are online, what would even be the purpose of producing a textbook? This week, RSP co-founder Chris Cotter is joined by Paul Hedges, who has taken on that monumental task in his recently published Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies.

During the interview, they discuss the role of the positionality of the author/scholar, the use of case studies, the selection of topics and themes, what the term ‘critical’ might mean in such an endeavour, and what decolonization mean in the context of textbook production.

This month’s episode of Discourse! covers issues of misinformation as it pertains to the upcoming Philippine presidential elections in May 2022 and to debates in the Orthodox church following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Be sure to tune in with Paul-François Tremlett, Daniel Gorman Jr., and Andie Alexander to find out more!

Watch the video episode here

Podcast Information Correction:

• The Ukrainian Catholic Church is in full communion with Rome. Learn more here.

Related Articles

• “A Church (Further) Divided: Putin’s Patriarch Now Faces a Rebellion from within the Russian Orthodox Church” Religion Dispatches
• “The bride wore fatigues. The wedding party carried rifles and RPGs.” The Washington Post
• Russian Orthodox Church in America
• “Head of US Ukrainian Catholic Church urges Americans to ‘call out people like Tucker Carlson’” Insider
• “Why white evangelical Christians are Putin’s biggest American fan base” MSNBC
• “Putin is ‘making it a religious war’ — Head of U.S. Ukrainian Orthodox Church slams Russian leader, Moscow Patriarch Kirill” The Salt Lake Tribune
• “Pope Francis criticizes the war while Orthodox Patriarch Kirill echoes Putin’s rationale for fighting” The Washington Post
• “Pat Robertson Insists Putin ‘Compelled by God’ to Invade Ukraine and Kick Off ‘End Times’” The Daily Beast
• “‘Baka matanso kayo’: Moreno warns Muslim youth of ancestors’ sacrifices during martial law” Inquirer News
• “Duterte said kill the bishops – and his word became flesh” Rappler

In this episode, Dr. Méadhbh McIvor joins Savannah Finver to discuss her recent book Representing God: Christian Legal Activism in Contemporary England. Dr. McIvor provides our listeners with the background for her project; the method of ethnography, as well as its challenges and implications for the study of religion; and how the belief in a certain kind of afterlife impacts the kinds of legal and political activism that her interlocutors are willing to engage in.

Throughout the entirety of WWII and the Cold War, U.S. intelligence agencies invested an immense amount of resources into the “religious approach” to information gathering and distribution. Beginning with the leadership of William Donovan, the OSS and CIA implemented these religion-focused initiatives with the assistance of Orientalist scholarship, such as the World Religions Paradigm. Imperial Japan, Colonial Vietnam, Soviet Russia, and the Puppet-state of Iran all felt the impacts of these operations, often resulting in widespread propaganda, resistance, and war. In this episode, Dr. Michael Graziano and Jacob Noblett discuss the misguided strategies used by these agencies and their partners with the goal of establishing the United States as a global champion of freedom over “Atheistic” Communism.

This month’s episode of Discourse! is hosted by Candace Mixon who’s joined by Craig Martin and Suzanne Owen. Their articles all coalesced into thinking through the importance of technicalities and words in the study of religion—when we are used to seeing the big picture, why does it matter to pay attention to things that seem small? Whether legalism comes through within a church community, local or federal judicial and legislative bodies, or nationalistic rhetoric, the stories we review all deal with the small details that make a big difference, and of course considers power and who gets to decide which details count, and why.

Watch the video episode here:

Articles Discussed:

• Dhume, Sadanand (2022). “India’s Hijab Debate Is Both Nuanced and Nasty.” The Wall Street Journal.
• Liptak, Adam (2022). “Supreme Court to Hear Case of Web Designer Who Objects to Same-Sex Marriage.” The New York Times.
• Migdon, Brooke (2022). “Virginia House passes bill to exempt religious organizations from nondiscrimination laws.” The Hill.
• Triesman, Rachel (2022). “An Arizona priest used one wrong word in baptisms for decades. They’re all invalid.” NPR.

In this edition of RSP Remix, we go deep into our archives to explore the insider/outsider problem in the study of religion. We explore questions such as “What is an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’?” and “How do scholars of religion study and engage ‘insiders’?” to begin unpacking what all is at stake in this process of group formation.

This episode features clips from the following episodes:

• “The Insider/Outsider Problem” with George Chryssides (2012)
• “Should Scholars of Religion be Critics or Caretakers?” roundtable with excerpts from Russell T. McCutcheon and Linda Woodhead (2012)
• “Identity or Identification?” roundtable with excerpts from Steven Ramey and K. Merinda Simmons (2013)
• “The Critical Study of Religion” with Bruce Lincoln (2015)
• “Categorising ‘Religion’: From Case Studies to Methodology” with Teemu Taira (2016)
• “Discourse Analysis & Ideology Critique in the Study of Religion” with Craig Martin (2021)

Check out our classroom-ready video episode below:

Over the past few years, a number of religious studies scholars have collaborated on events on the theme of ‘spiritual abuse’. While this has been a topic of research and debate for some time, these events have worked especially hard to bring together survivors, researchers, practitioners and pastoral workers in respectful dialogue. This roundtable brings together a few of those scholars, in the wake of the Spiritual Abuse conference at the University of Chester, and a series of online seminars for INFORM. Join host Theo Wildcroft and panelists Wendy Dossett, Dawn Llewellyn, Suzanne Newcombe, and Lisa Oakley as they discuss the difficulties and opportunities of such events, where they might develop next, interdisciplinary boundaries, and the limits of professional commitments to justice. Is this perhaps the start of an ‘ethical turn’ in the study of religion?

What sort of discursive traps to we fall into when talking about ‘Islam’ or ‘the West’? How might we reframe our discussions with a critical humanist approach? In this episode, Khurram Hussain joins Andie Alexander to discuss his recent book, The Muslim Speaks (Zed Books, 2020). Hussain unpacks issues of binary discourses about “the Muslims world” and “the west” and explores the benefits of critically engaging Islam in a way that works to re-politicize rather than de-politicize Muslim voices by taking seriously the human-focused study of religion.

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How does the media report religion when religion doesn’t “behave”? What happens when religion becomes part of discourse that promotes civil disobedience, or to promote conspiracy theories? What if someone wants to make a robot rabbi or name their child something you think is blasphemous? When religion doesn’t behave — that is, doesn’t fit the implicit idea that it should be quiet, personal, liberal and “nice” — we are given an opportunity to observe boundary-making in the public sphere in real time.

The first Discourse! of 2022 is hosted by Michael Munnik (Cardiff), who is joined by guests Beth Singler (Cambridge) and Richard Newton (Alabama) to discuss how the media is talking about “religion” this month.

Watch the video episode here:

Further Reading

• “Tim LaHaye had some choice words for Wheaton College when the evangelical school hosted a memorial service for Martin Luther King Jr.“
• “After opposition to her MLK Day speech, Nikole Hannah-Jones swapped her words for his“
• Mason Mennenga on Twitter
• “Presenter Maajid Nawaz is axed by LBC: Anti-extremism activist who was accused of tweeting ‘deranged rubbish’ about vaccines by host Iain Dale and faced criticism for spreading Covid conspiracy theories leaves radio station“
• “Lior Cole Is the Model Combining Artificial Intelligence With Religion“
• “Parents hit back at trolls over baby name and say ‘we are not Satanists’“

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the “psychedelic renaissance” for the development of medical psychotherapy and spiritual growth in countries of the global north. From alternative therapy centers in the USA and Canada, to tourist retreats in the Amazon, and spiritual communities in Europe, psychedelics have taken a new breath of life for the past 20 years in each of these locations. Their current popularity is due to the surprising results they achieve in the betterment of mental health disorders and personal fulfillment. Thus, plants and substances like the San Pedro cactus, psilocybin mushrooms, cannabis, LSD, MDMA, and more prominently, ayahuasca, have become “magic bullets” of sorts, all-powerful solutions to all-pervasive problems of the western world. Unfortunately, critical issues related to their consumption are lost from sight in the face of the enthusiasm and amazement of their effects.

On the other hand, psychedelic substances, i.e., substances that enable powerful bodily and visionary experiences, have been used in different societies across the world, and for a wider array of purposes than the previously described. For instance, indigenous peoples of the Peruvian rainforest like the Awajún, Huni Kuin, or Matsigenka ritually consume ayahuasca for purposes of divination, rite of passage, bolstering of social bonds, healing, exercise and countering witchcraft, etc. Thus, a key question comes forward, why does such a gap of emphasis exist between the purposes that arise in western contexts and the ones from other societies? Moreover, in the case of ayahuasca, why the particular concoction of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis Caapi) and the Chacruna plant (Psychotria viridis) has become so salient in the contemporary psychedelic landscape, despite being one of the possible plant admixtures among the many that indigenous people use?

In this episode, Sidney Castillo talks with Dr. Bernd Brabec de Mori and Dr. Olivia Marcus about their respective research on critical approaches for studying ayahuasca. Both have carried out ethnographic research in the Peruvian amazon in different settings; Brabec de Mori with the Shipibo of the Ucayali region, and Marcus among the mestizo populations of Tarapoto and Iquitos. Their critical discussion elaborates on the meanings and motivations for the indigenous and mestizo people to use ayahuasca, framing into context the major socio-cultural processes that allowed for it to be discovered, spread, and “rediscovered” in recent times. In this sense, they address issues of inequality, power relations, ownership, and reciprocity that lie at the core of ayahuasca consumption in the Peruvian Amazon. In consequence, they discuss what would decolonize our approaches to ayahuasca entail, if this is a possibility at all, and what would be the course of action for this to happen.

This episode results from the workshop “From Ritual to Justice: Towards a Decolonial and Feminist Approach to Ayahuasca”, organized by Olivia Marcus and Silvia Mesturini. It was part of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) XIII Biennial Conference, June 21-June 25 and June 28-July 2, 2021. Hosted virtually by the University of Virginia due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For our final interview of the semester, tune in to our co-founder David G. Robertson discussing his new book Gnosticism and the History of Religions with our co-editor Andie Alexander. In this episode, Robertson outlines the history and use of the term ‘gnosticism’ to examine how gnosticism has come to work as a ‘free-floating’ signifier. Robertson then considers how the ‘strange charm of gnosticism’ has helped keep the term and idea prevalent in the study of religion, particularly in how understanding gnosticism as a special knowledge is linked with notions of religious experience. It’s a great episode—be sure to check it out!

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In this episode, Dr. Breann Fallon sits down with Professor Daniel Boyarin to discuss his monograph Judaism: Genealogy of the Jewish Notion makes the bold argument that the very concept of a religion of ‘Judaism’ is an invention of the Christian church. Before discussing the monograph, Boyarin outlines how Judaism is commonly defined in religious studies, as well as the potential problems with those definitions, particularly with regard to the sometimes competing conceptualisations of Judaism as a ‘religion’ or a ‘culture’.

Boyarin highlights the importance of memory and memorialisation as deeply-rooted elements of Jewish practice, especially of moments of genocide and massacre such as the Shoah, which subtly addresses notions of the World Religions Paradigm discussed in previous episodes. Boyarin also argues against “religifying” studies of Jewish texts and instead emphasises both the ideas of inclusivity inherent in the Talmud and its broader applicability, regardless of the religiosity of the reader, in order to fully encapsulate all the life forms and practices that exist in the Jewish community. To bring the conversation to a close, Fallon asks of the humour in the Talmud and Boyarin’s favourite comical moments in the text.

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In this month’s episode of discourse we have an update from Australia. Professor Carole Cusack (University of Sydney) and Ray Radford (University of Sydney and RSP) sit down with Dr. Breann Fallon (Sydney Jewish Museum and RSP) to discuss religion in Australian current affairs. This team of three first consider a conservative article on the amendments Equal Opportunity Bill in Victoria which claims “religion cancelled” and “parents cancelled.” Yet, there is no denying that the three are speaking from lockdown and the conversation turns to religious exemption from vaccination, including the history of this in Australia, as well as religious symbolism at anti-lockdown protests. To end the episode, the trio discuss the interesting timing of opening up in time for Christmas — is this an offering at the temple of consumerism? Whilst there is no answer, it is an interesting take on the impact of COVID-19 on religious festivals.

• “Is there likely to be a religious exemption for the COVID-19 vaccine?“
• “A pattern of anti-family, anti-religion legislation is emerging in Victoria“
• “‘Australians are very sceptical’: Michael Kirby warns against ‘excessive protection’ of religious freedoms“
• “Scott Morrison pushes premiers to stick to vaccination plan and allow interstate travel by Christmas“

Check out the video of this episode!

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!

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.

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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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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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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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.

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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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.