The Religious Studies Project Master Archive

Religious studies approaches to the environment have long privileged Western ecological frameworks. Anna Gade’s work, Muslim Environmentalisms reframes this area, both critiquing and building upon the tools of religious studies (RS) and environmental humanities (EH). Religious studies, for its part, has privileged Jewish and Christian understandings of key ideas such as nature and wilderness. This bias has left the field less capable of responding to the rising need for studies about efforts globally by many religious groups to address climate crises. EH has also suffered from this overreliance, and Gade’s work identifying the different approaches toward the environment of her Indonesian Muslim interlocutors is a critical step forward. Interviewed by Lauren Osborne and David McConeghy, this episode discusses the challenges this interdisciplinary work faces and shares some of the reasons why the inclusion of Muslim perspectives into the broader conversation about religion and the environment is so desperately needed today.

What is a myth? What might we mean by myth-making? What can an approach to how people make myths and tell stories in their everyday lives bring to the study of ‘religion’ and ‘non-religion’? And what might Gandalf and Captain Picard have to do with any of this? Joining Chris to discuss myth-making and its role among non-religious people, and climate and environmental activists is Dr. Tim Stacey of Leiden University.

Don’t miss our earlier episode with Dr. Stacey about Myth and post-liberalism or his book.

In this episode, RSP co-editor Breann Fallon sat down with long-time friend of the podcast, Professor Carole Cusack of the University of Sydney to discuss sacred trees. Cusack has published widely on the topic including her 2011 monograph The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and a recent special volume of the Journal of Religion and Nature edited by Cusack. Beginning with Cusack’s journey to studying the sacred tree, the conversation turns to specific examples of the Fortingall Yew and Glastonbury Thorn, both of which connect to Christianity. Turning to contemporary examples, Fallon and Cusack discuss the 2020 destruction of the Djab Wurrung tree in Australia.

Back in 2011, Charlotte Ward and David Voas published an article addressing the synthesis of New Age spirituality with conspiracy thinking as “conspirituality.” A decade later, their analysis seems critical for understanding figures like the QAnon Shaman, widespread anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation campagins, and, more broadly, the rapid spread of America of America’s “paranoid politics” as much of the media’s dominant form of dialogue about issues ranging from vaccines to climate change.

In this January episode of our current events podcast, Discourse!, Savannah Finver speaks with Candace Mixon and Suzanne Newcombe as the team wrestles with the QAnon Shaman and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Presidential election certification, pandemic anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns, and growing evidence of the “conspirituality.”

Be sure to take a look at the at-home links below. Don’t forget! If you see a current events article or story you think we should include in our monthly Discourse! episodes, please send it to editors@religousstudieproject.com or tweet it to us @projectrs.

This month’s links include:

• Chris Cuomo interviews Q Anon Shaman
• Senator Susan Collins admits she believed “Iranians” were attacking the White House
• Litchfield Cathedral turned into a vaccination center.
• RSPH struggles with low South Asian vaccine rates
• Religion Dispatches piece on the New Age blending with the radical right

Original Source for “Conspirituality” by Ward and Voas:

Charlotte Ward & Prof. David Voas (2011). “The Emergence of Conspirituality,” Journal of Contemporary Religion, 26:1, 103-121, DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2011.539846

Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, pulls few punches. It begins with and dwells deeply on what Baldwin, a towering mid-20th century American literary figure, called the “lie at the heart of America.” The lie is the value gap — the ways America has elevated the worth of white lives over those of people in other racialized groups. Baldwin’s unfettered honesty about this lie, explains Dr. Glaude, means that we have a chance to imagine a world that is otherwise. Just as Baldwin went abroad as an “elsewhere” from which to renew and sustain his critique of American identity, today Dr. Glaude urges us to begin again. We can, he argues, “choose to be better. We need only build a world where that choice can be made with relative ease.” The choice to see things differently confronts the hard truths America hides from itself, especially those which are bound up in the origin stories Americans tell ourselves about who we are and where we have come from. To see those truths as Baldwin did means the opportunity to begin again, starting with recognizing past hurts and ongoing harms without letting go of the promise of redemption or even salvation that follows. On this 2020 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, please enjoy this timely and critical discussion about race and religion in the U.S.

Can you believe it has been 10 years? After more than 350 episodes, over 600 contributors, and the rapidly approaching milestone of a million downloads, we’re still here doing the weekly work of sharing research in the critical study of religion.

In this special episode of the Religious Studies Project podcast, the RSP team reflects on the legacy of the project and the future of our work. Co-hosts Breann Fallon and David McConeghy solicited reflections from current and former team members, and this episode features some of the highlights including comments by founders Chris Cotter and David Robertson; interviewers Candace Mixon, Sidney Castillo, and Dan Gorman; board members Russell McCutcheon and Carole Cusack, and editors Thomas Coleman and Lauren Osborne. With extreme gratitude for the many, many contributors and listeners to the Religious Studies Project for a decade of scholarship, we’re proud to say, “Thanks for listening!”

Welcome to our MidYear Special 2020!

It’s a COVID-style international spectacular for the ninth(!) annual RSP mid-season special. It’s time to play… the Weakest Link!

Join Andie Alexander, Jonathon O’Donnel, Titus Hjelm, Naomi Goldenberg, Sidney Castillo, Russell McCutcheon, Ray Radford, and Megan Goodwin as David Robertson fires questions at them and Chris Cotter remotely operates PowerPoint!

Who will win the coveted fictional research funding?

Aaron Hughes – we apologise in advance!

If this gets you in the festive mood, you might want to check out our back catalogue of festive specials:

• 2012 – Only 60 Seconds!
• 2013 – Nul Point!
• 2014 – Masterbrain!
• 2015 – Fourteen to One!
• 2016 – The Unverifiable Truth-Claim!
• 2017 – Scrape My Barrel!
• 2018 – The Deadline
• 2019 – Only 60 Seconds! (take 2)

In this last regular episode of the first half of our 2020-2021 season, Breann Fallon talks to Dr. Kathleen McPhillips about her work on the Catholic Church and the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017). In her research, Dr. McPhillips utilised Erving Goffman’s work on stigma, and in this episode, she speaks on the process of stigmatisation of survivors by the institutions in which they experienced abuse, both at the time and during their process of disclosure. The conversation turns to the impact of this abuse on the survivor’s religious experience, a topic she has written on in her article “Soul Murder” (2018). In discussing the impact on faith, Dr. McPhillips highlights the impact of the commission’s findings on the broader religious community, where many experienced the shaking of faith foundations due to the central position of religious institutions in the creation of their worldview. The episode ends with Dr. McPhillips sharing her critically important pilot podcast series, The Survivor Story Podcast, which explores the experiences of 5 survivors of church-based institutional child sexual abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese.

This month’s Discourse! – with Chris Cotter, Ray Kim, and Theo Wildcroft – kicks off with a festive twist on our now-traditional focus upon Covid-19. The panelists discuss the recent decision in the UK to relax lockdown over the Christmas period, and how this intersects with the category of ‘religion’. Sticking with Covid-19, the discussion then moves to the production of vaccines and whether these will be considered ‘halal’ in Islamic communities. This leads to some fascinating conversations around bodily autonomy, agency, the interaction between ‘science’ and ‘religion’, and much more.

The discussion then moves to an emotional long-read from The Guardian focusing upon an individual who emerged from a ‘locked-in’ state and was able to tell the tale. Again, bodily autonomy and agency are the order of the day here. And again, so much more.

Finally, a seemingly amusing story about an unlucky holy stone in Ireland once again raises critical issues surrounding power, agency, and classification.

Links to stories:

• Bittersweet sentiments on lockdown easing in the UK from ‘non-Christian’ leaders…
• And some not so diplomatic sentiments 
• Halal vaccines
• Jake Haendel’s lock-in story
• The unlucky stone

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. The movement of goods, ideas, people, and culture between Brazil and Australia in the last century has meant thriving transnational communities in the Southern hemisphere. At Hillsong, one of Australia’s dynamic Pentecostal groups, members use community groups to navigate intercultural obstacles like finding a job, paying taxes, or learning English. Blurring the boundaries of religious and secular, Hillsong’s megachurches play a powerful role in helping Brazilians find their way in modern Australia.

The study of religion has been dominated by two approaches to religious change: the secularisation thesis, and the “lived religion” paradigm. They form a contradictory pair, one stressing decline, and the other stressing innovation. One stresses reason, the other stresses experience – yet both center on the individual as the “source” of religion. What would a post-humanist model of religion and society look like?

This question is at the core of Paul-Francois Tremlett’s new book, Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change: Sovereignties and Disruptions. Drawing from scholars including Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, and Bruno Latour, Tremlett argues for an approach to religious and social worlds that does not begin with immutable things like religion, class, society, or the self, but instead prioritises flux, dialectic, and transformation. This is a new model that rejects both the teleology of modernity and the heroic individual.

In this conversation with Elizabeth Pérez, we explore her book Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. Dr. Pérez explains what drove her interests in the Lucumí tradition and how she became acquainted with her interlocutors at Ilé Laroye. We discuss her role in her fieldwork as a participant-observer and how her positionality as such alerted her to the importance of preparing ritual meals in the construction of religious subjectivity at Ilé Laroye. We also examine how gender roles are constructed and understood in and through the processes of preparing ritual sacrifices and the ways in which these constructions challenge traditional Western gender norms.

The U.S. is quickly approaching the 2020 presidential election. Join Andie Alexander, Hina Muneeruddin, and Leslie Dorrough Smith in this month’s episode of Discourse! (recorded after the 2nd presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden) as they explore the rhetoric and affect of the presidential campaigns and debates thus far. The panelists discuss how presidential debates are forms of public spectacle designed to reinforce ideas of “presidentialism” and how claims of nationalism are a type of religious rhetoric.

The panelists recommend exploring the related links:

“Some Reflections on Separatism and Power” by Marilyn Frye

“The War on Masks Is a Cover-up for Toxic Masculinity“

“’Might as Well Carry a Purse with That Mask, Joe’: COVID-19, Toxic Masculinity, and the Sad State of National Politics“

Maria Hinojosa – One on One

The question of the origins of ancient Christianity has puzzled believers and skeptics alike. For the first, the history of Christianity is the anchor point for claims of authenticity. For the second, a search for origins opens religious traditions to questions about their contingency and sui generis status. So the perspectives most often speak past each other, both sides internalizing their structure of authority and creating logics of practice to sustain themselves.

In this week’s episode, the RSP’s Sidney Castillo talks with Professor William Arnal of the University of Regina about his research on ancient Christian origins. First, Prof. Arnal uses the perspective of Religious Studies to interrogate the question of origins. He points out how this field differs from theology and how it attempts to demystify religious phenomena. This bracketing of the miraculous and supernatural is of special relevance today, since many scholars (certainly in the past and some still even today) have regarded Christianity as sui generis either in kind, origin, or truth.

The second part of the conversation is directed towards the discussion of the Gospel of Thomas and the Q, two important New Testament sources that, through Arnal’s sharp contextualization, help reveal the diverse social contexts of early communities that saw themselves as followers of Jesus. Prof. Arnal argues that one of the main causes for the emergence of these early communities and their discourses related to salvation and denial of this world come was because they faced great social change. From the expansion of the Roman Empire in the 1st century to the 2nd century, we see greater and more deliberate use of “Christian” identities alongside growing traditions and practices.

Arnal concludes that we can “put to bed” the historical Jesus once and for all, as it is less valuable for scholars to debate the accuracy or authenticity of our sources as many scholars have done. We should, rather, find what insights are available to us to show how the people of the time related to the discourse of a folk hero. What agency was gained by becoming a Christian in this era? What social and economic privileges might be gained or lost? Reconfiguring our approach to early Christianity shifts our focus on this era towards religious studies and the tools we have to study social phenomenon and away from the desire to use historicity or authenticity as a cover for older understandings of the purpose of our field’s efforts.

What is the current climate of climate change in a variety of religious communities? Why is food such an important part of discussing climate and religion?

In this episode, the RSP’s Candace Mixon talks to Dr. Gretel Van Wieren to get the current climate of climate change responses from religious communities. An expert in environmental, agricultural, and food ethics, Dr. Van Wieren shares her research on small farms run by religious communities. Such farms, whether in Upstate New York or Michigan, have changed their traditional practices in order to directly address ethical and environmental concerns. Dr. Van Wieran shows the way climate activism has often been a concern for religiously-connected farms, but current events make this a more pressing concern today than ever before. Can large scale agricultural productions learn from the adaptations of their smaller, religious competitors? Those teaching undergraduate courses on Christian, Jewish, or Muslim groups will also find this conversation a source of practical advice for integrating the current climate crisis into our religious studies curriculums.

In this episode, RSP co-editor Breann Fallon speaks with Assistant Professor Richard Newton about his new book Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox 2020). At issue is the concept, use, and function of “scripture,” particularly through the example of Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots. Newton explains the success of Haley’s best-selling novel about the life of Kunta Kinte and his descendants and the novel’s place in the canonical narrative of America for both Black and White Americans. By examining Roots as a piece of scripture, Newton illustrates the grounding power of the book’s narrative — a wellspring of theology and culture for Americans for almost fifty years. Following an anthropological approach to the study of scripture more broadly, Newton sees the function of scripture as multiple, relying on diverse meanings of the root of the terms, uproot, and route. Drawing attention to Roots as a scriptural text that plays an active role in both power and identity politics, the discussion concludes by turning to the Black Lives Matters movement and the recent use of Haley’s Roots by American politicians.

This month’s Discourse! is presented by Sidney Castillo, with his guests Maria Nita, Juan Manuel Rubio Arevalo, and Stefanie Butendieck. Discussion focuses on the effects of COVID restrictions on different religious communities, including festivals, activism, funeral practices, and the Chilean “Mapuche” community. The conversation goes on to discuss the role of scholars in policy-making, particularly in a South American context. Finally, the panelists discuss Amy Kaufman’s and Paul Sturtevant’s 2020 book The Devil’s Historians: How modern extremists abuse the medieval past, which explores how religion is portrayed and constructed in contemporary medievalism.

Resources for this episode include:

Festival Research and Covid-19 from the recent virtual event sponsored by The Open University: http://fass.open.ac.uk/festivals-research

For a broad sense of the issues with the Mapuche community, you can view the online news article: https://chiletoday.cl/site/the-effects-of-covid-19-on-the-mapuche-community/

This bonus-length roundtable episode brings scholars of various disciplines and ranks together to discuss their experiences in the study of Buddhist ritual. Working in areas of art history, Buddhist Studies, anthropology, and cultural studies, the panelists shed light on some of the challenges and promises of working within and across disciplines. Topics range from “ritual” as a critical scholarly term, interdisciplinary contributions to the field of ritual studies, issues of ritual change, and current challenges (and benefits) to international and interdisciplinary work during the current global health crisis. Overall, this conversation reveals the complex interplay between research demands, institutional support, field-wide assumptions, and technological challenges that shape the way scholarship on ritual is produced. Listen now for a glimpse of how interdisciplinary approaches can help widen the scope of academic work in each of these areas and improve the way scholars approach the study of Buddhist rituals.

Take a journey into the dark heart of American politics in this month’s Discourse! Join David Robertson, Megan Goodwin, Savannah Finver, and S. Jonathon O’Donnell to discuss QAnon. Explore the roots of this multifaceted conspiracy theory in the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare of the 1980s and ’90s, the parallels with earlier millennial narratives, and the connections with modern evangelical Christianity. The panelists also discuss how depictions of QAnon in religious language (i.e., “death cult”) are being used by different actors within and outside the movement, with both sides revealing significant features of contemporary American politics.

The panelists recommend the following piece by Adrienne LaFrance, “The Prophecies of Q,” part of The Atlantic‘s project “Shadowland” about conspiracy thinking in America.

“Decades of work is all of a sudden viable and possible in the blink of an eye,” says CU Boulder Professor Natalie Avalos in the final moments of her conversation with RSP Co-Host David McConeghy. After last season’s conversation with Malory Nye that highlighted the colonialism and racism embedded in the European roots of the field of religious studies and its earliest forefathers, we continue this season with the perspective of a scholar of religion positioned within Ethnic Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies.

In her work on modern, urban Indians in New Mexico, Dr. Avalos highlights the need for theories that center the lived experiences and ontological realities of her interlocutors. These do not come from white Europeans writing a century or more ago. To uncritically retain these relics of our field’s past is to be complicit in perpetuating their structural and psychological harm as components of colonialism. It makes us complicit in that legacy’s ongoing trauma, so how do we break this cycle? What has changed that makes this work “viable and possible” today?

Dr. Avalos shows us a way forward, one rooted in decolonial theories like regeneration that not only express Indigenous epistemologies, but also create moments of deep reflection for our students. She urges us to do more to make visible our hidden relations to structures of power. This is the work of decolonizing religious studies. If we aspire to produce transformative work — including teaching and scholarship that changes how we think and improves our lives — then we need to start with ourselves and the work we can each do peeling back the layers of our own complicity in sustaining colonialism’s vestiges. That’s the challenge of forging a more just and more rewarding path for our field’s future.

Regular listeners to the Religious Studies Project will be familiar with the critique of the category of ‘religion’. Our podcasts with, for example, Naomi Goldenberg, James Cox, and Tim Fitzgerald, demonstrate that ‘religion’ is a distorting anachronism with roots in European colonial exploitation that has been utilized to justify the cultural superiority of Christian Europe, and is at base ‘a citation of Christianity as idealized prototype’ (Goldenberg 2018: 80). But what might it mean to decolonize the study of religion? How can we take this well-rehearsed critique and put it into practice?

In this podcast, Chris is joined by Malory Nye to discuss the decolonizing project. Why is it necessary? Should we speak of decolonizing rather than decolonization? How can the field address its whiteness, and its colonial origins and legacy? What are the theoretical, methodological, historical and pedagogical challenges that this might entail? How can ‘we’ ensure that this is a thorough decolonizing project and not merely a nod to neoliberal higher education agendas? And what can those of us who have limited time and resources at our disposal do to address this urgent and thoroughly pervasive problem with the study of religion? These questions and more animate this broad-ranging discussion with the author of Religion: The Basics, and two key journal articles – “Race and religion: postcolonial formations of power and whiteness” and “Decolonizing the Study of Religion”.