The Religious Studies Project Master Archive

Happy May the Fourth! Today we bring you a special episode of The Religious Studies Project to celebrate 2020’s International Star Wars Day. After the release of Star Wars film in 1977, it became obvious that creator George Lucas had tapped into something profound. Over the next few decades, Star Wars became a behemoth worth billions of dollars and a multi-media franchise spanning film, television, video games, comic books, novels, theme parks, toys, and much more. Since 2012, the RSP has touched on Star Wars many times, most often in discussions of invented, fictional, or hyper-real religions. Enjoy the selections from six different episodes as we learn why this franchise and other popular cultural institutions are important sites for the production of identity and the construction of the category of religion.

To hear the original recordings, please visit the following episodes:

• Episode 321: Artificial Intelligence and Religion — Christopher Cotter interviews Beth Singler (February 2020)
• Episode 281: Slenderman and Online Mythology — Ross Downing interviews Vivian Asimos (February 2019)
• Episode 235: Hyper-Real Religion, Digital Capitalism and the Pygmalion Effect — Sammy Bishop interviews Adam Possamai (November 2017)
• Episode 190: Categorising Religion from Case Studies to Methodology — Breann Fallon interviews Teemu Taira (September 2016)
• Episode 12: Fiction-based Religions — Christopher Cotter interviews Markus Davidsen (April 2012)
• Episode 3: Invented Religions — David G Roberston interviews Carole Cusack (January 2012)

Boxers routinely cultivate personal brands that integrate religious, ethnic, and national identities says Professor Arlene Sanchez Walsh in this conversation with David McConeghy about the relationship between sport and self. To what degree are boxer’s religious affiliations only as skin deep as their tattoos? What are the goals for boxers looking to integrate their personal narratives of religious conversion as elements of their professional identity? What are the different stakes for audiences or communities with longstanding support for the sport? In this moment of social distancing, please enjoy this moment of reflection on the intersections of sport and religion. No matter what sport you may find yourself a fan of, we hope that you can soon return to playing and watching it soon.

In April’s episode of Discourse!, Chris Cotter, Chris Silver and Savannah Finver place the current global situation relating to coronavirus front and centre in their discussion. Come for serious commentary but stay for some levity in the form of cats and dogs. Topics of discussion concern the adaption of certain practices for online spaces, the regulation of the ‘religious’ by the ‘secular’, state hardship funding for ‘religious’ institutions in the US, funeral practices, the excellent recent ‘You’re all Muslim” tweet, and comments on the NHS ‘as religion’ in the UK.

Links for items discussed in this episode:

• https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/news-comment/the-nhs-our-national-religion-2/ • https://abcnews.go.com/Health/ongoing-religious-services-spark-debate-faith-verses-safety/ • https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/news-comment/congregations-rise-as-worship-moves-to-the-internet/ • https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/06/828462517/another-break-from-the-past-government-will-help-churches-pay-pastor-salaries?

On religion-related pet ownership:

• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jssr.12637 [Academic] • https://religionnews.com/2020/01/07/why-your-faith-may-predict-whether-you-love-cats-or-dogs/ • https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2020/01/07/commentary-atheists/ • http://urbanchristiannews.com/2020/01/study-shows-that-atheists-prefer-cats-while-christians-love-dogs/ • https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7855331/Churchgoers-likely-cats-atheists-study-finds.html

Accounts of Near Death Experiences will no doubt be very familiar to listeners of the RSP and the broader public. From fictional accounts such as the Wizard of Oz or Flatliners, to self-reports which grew in popularity in the mid-twentieth century, many of us will be know narrative tropes such as the tunnel, the life review, and the out of body experience. Existing research has tended to, on the one hand, focus on the pathological elements of Near Death Narratives – attempting to ‘explain away’ the phenomenon in reductionistic terms – or, on the other hand, view such accounts as substantive proof of a ‘world beyond’. In today’s podcast, we showcase an approach which accepts reports of Near Death Experiences as discourse, and attempts to understand them in their social, cultural, and historical context. Further, we ask what is the relationship between these narratives and contemporary discourse on ‘religion’? Joining Chris Cotter in this podcast is Professor Jens Schlieter, who has admirably addressed these questions and more in his recent book What Is It Like To Be Dead? Near-Death Experiences, Christianity, and the Occult (OUP 2018).

In this episode, we discuss definitions of Near Death Experiences, how one might study reports of such experiences from a critical study of religion perspective, how such reports are related to modern societal developments such as ‘secularization’, individualization, and advances in medical science, as well as the impact of ‘religious’ meta-cultures upon these reports and the potential ‘religious’ functions they appear to serve.

In a co-edited volume, Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Contested Desires, Birgit Meyer and Terje Stordalen bring together innovative perspectives on the prevalence of images in religious traditions often described as harboring aniconistic tendencies. Should we really see these traditions as “anti-image”? This episode charts some of the major moves taking place in the volume, especially the presumption of the normative stance of aniconism in the study of these traditions. What if we turn instead to the aesthetic regimes of the religious traditions in question by  considering their shared habitus or the methods of “seeing”used by their members? Such a shift reveals the political nature of debates over images, and the power of iconoclasm. Referring to specific case studies from the volume, the conversation offers ideas about re-imagining and challenging the assumption by scholars that practitioners of religious traditions such as Islam, Judaism, or Christianity hold a contemptuous view of images. Perhaps an increased focus on aesthetic regimes rather than images can provide a superior way to analyze and select data for this area of religious studies.

Norman Lear was a central figure in American television in the 1970s. His media productions like All in the Family were deeply activist, reflecting his ideas about what kinds of dialogue and reflection were needed to preserve American society in an era of sharp divisions over social and political issues that came to be called the Culture Wars. As a voice for progressivism and liberalism, Lear articulated a powerful vision of the public square where civility was the shared root for multicultural America. In this conversation, Dr. Benji Rolsky frames the public square as the central discursive space for mid 20th century liberals, one which not only gave them great social leverage but also limited their future strategic options to respond to the emergence of the religious right as a consolidated political block starting with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

• “With religion-related rulings on the horizon, U.S. Christians see Supreme Court favorably”
  • https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/03/with-religion-related-rulings-on-the-horizon-u-s-christians-see-supreme-court-favorably/

• “Pagans express outrage and disappointment over ‘book review'”
  • https://wildhunt.org/2020/01/pagans-expresses-outrage-and-disappointment-over-book-review.html

• “Shielded for Decades, A Yoga Leader’s Alleged Sexual Abuse Finally Comes Under Fire”
  • https://gen.medium.com/shielded-for-decades-a-yoga-leaders-alleged-sexual-abuse-finally-comes-under-fire-97b79ddf990b

• “Oxford dean accused of failing to report child sexual assault claim”
  • https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/04/oxford-dean-accused-of-failing-to-report-child-sexual-assault-claim

• “Master of Deceit: How Yogi Bhajan Used Kundalini Yoga for Money, Sex and Power”
  • https://gurumag.com/master-of-deceit-how-yogi-bhajan-used-kundalini-yoga-for-money-sex-and-power/

This second interview with Timothy Fitzgerald covers his later work, from Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007) and Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (2011). In these works, thinking about the historical development of the category “religion” leads to consideration of other ‘modern’ categories which make up the colonial epistemé. If religion is deconstructed, where does that leave the other categories that use or rely on it? What happens to its common opposites like “the secular”, “science”, “liberalism” or even “politics”?

Fitzgerald argues that this mutually-dependent signalling system largely emerged in the late 17th century.  As rhetorical terms expressing specific class interests and aspirations in concrete situations of power, this system of signals originated in the context of the ancient regimes and sacred Monarchies of Christian Europe. Since then, each category has been continually contested, with shifting and unstable meanings. Now they have become so capacious and universalised that they have no clear boundaries, and we cannot properly distinguish between them. Yet these ideas have, over time and through repetition, become normalised and neutralised such that they appear as common sense. Today they form the basic categories for the organisation of our institutions, including academia and universities.

Listen to the first part of David G. Robertson’s interview with Timothy Fitzgerald on The Ideology of Religious Studies here: Episode 322 “The Problem with ‘Religion’ and Related Categories”

Religious Nationalism is the focus of a newly released book by journalist Katherine Stewart called The Power Worshippers (Bloomsbury Press). Framing her work as a decade-plus interest in the political and rhetorical moves of conservative Christians in the United States, Stewart raises an alarm about the distributed assault she sees on the wall separating Church and State. In a politically charged moment in the United States, Stewart’s work emerges within a growing body of public-facing literature that sees intimate connections between radical religious groups and the ongoing struggle for the political and cultural power to shape American life.

Beliefs are not written in stone. They change over time and sometimes we hold contradictory beliefs. Taking beliefs as changing and nuanced rather than fixed reveals the role of narratives and cultural context in shaping beliefs.  In this week’s episode, Sidney Castillo’s conversation with Ülo Valk introduces us to some of the ways in which this process occurs in the form of vernacular religion. Focusing on the personal nature of these changes, Valk sees beliefs as fluid, which problematizes the stability of other categories such as knowledge and truth. Especially when we express beliefs as narratives, we change the way we understand the world. Valk’s research in Mayong, a village in northeast India, shows how beliefs about the use of magic, divination, gods, and mantras, allow for personalized and open-ended cultural traditions ripe for innovation.

This podcast was recorded and produced in the context of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR), “Religion – Continuations and Disruptions” held in Tartu, June 25 to June 29, 2019. We kindly thank the EASR Committee and the University of Tartu scientific committee, organising team, and volunteers for the support provided during this process.

Can a new journal expand how we think of America when we focus on religion? These two categories, religion and America, are at the center of American Religion, a new semiannual publication from Indiana University Press edited by Sarah Imhoff and M. Cooper Harriss. In this episode recorded at the 2019 AAR conference in San Diego, Imhoff and Harriss speak about what it’s like to found a new journal and where it will fit in the landscape of scholarship on religion in America. Be sure to visit the journal’s website, which hosts a number of digital-only features and details on subscriptions: american-religion.org/.

Tim Fitzgerald is one of the foundational figures in the critical study of religion, and his seminal volume, The Ideology of Religious Studies, was published twenty years ago this year. In this interview – the first of a two-part retrospective – we discuss his career and how his studies in Hinduism and his time spent in Japan led him to question the relationship of categories like caste and ritual to the broader category ‘religion’. His realisation was that religion is such a broad category that it can include almost everything. We discuss the historical development of the category, and its roots in Protestant theological ideas, and the political movements of the eighteenth century. This leads into a critique of the essentialist assumptions hidden by the category, and the phenomenological ideas in its use in academia, and its function as a tool in power relations.

What is Artificial Intelligence and why might we want to consider it in relation to ‘religion’? What religion-related questions might be raised by AI? Are these ‘religious’ questions or ‘Christian’/’post-Christian’ ones? What ‘religious’ functions might AI serve? In what ways do popular discourses about AI intersect with religion-related discourses? Do narratives of AI form part of a teleological atheist narrative, or do they perpetuate prevalent tropes associated with ‘established’ or ‘new’ religious movements? And what are the intersections of AI and religion with issues such as slavery, human identity, affect and agency? This week, Chris is joined by Dr Beth Singler of the University of Cambridge to discuss these issues and many more.

This podcast builds on a roundtable discussion released on the RSP in February 2017, featuring Beth, Chris, Michael Morelli, Vivian Asimos and Jonathan Tuckett, titled “AI and Religion: An Initial Conversation” and a special issue of the RSP journal Implicit Religion, co-edited by Dr Singler, on Artificial Intelligence and Religion, published in 2017.

This week’s podcast with Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst explores the University of Vermont’s new “Religious Literacy for Professionals” certificate. Framing religious literacy as social justice, Morgenstein Fuerst explains how her program is trying to reach undergraduates in other professional tracks at the 10 colleges around her university. With a powerful message for her students about the impact and relevance of religious studies coursework, this new program looks to prepare students for the modern America where religious affiliation is down but the need to be skilled “readers” of religion in culture is more pressing than ever.

The 2019 conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions, at Leeds Trinity University, was loosely themed on the topic ‘Visualizing Cultures: Media, Technology and Religion’, and this provided an excellent focal point for a discussion of Media and the Study of Religion more broadly. With that in mind, we convened a virtually mediated roundtable discussion with Suzanne Owen (conference organizer), Vivian Asimos and Tim Hutchings speaking with RSP co-founder Chris Cotter. These contributors bring a broad range of expertise and experience to the discussion, with work focusing upon online and digital spaces, the built environment, art, literature, broadcast media, social media, podcasting, and more. Discussion begins with the conference, before turning to how a media approach can help the study of religion, what we might mean by media and mediation, challenges of taking a media approach, the utilization of media in teaching, how to avoid reifying ‘religion’ in the process, and more.

This discussion works well as a companion piece with a number of previous RSP podcasts, including Religion and the News (with Eileen Barker, Tim Hutchings, Christopher Landau, and David Gordon Wilson), Religion and the Media  (with Teemu Taira), Religious Authority and Social Media (with Pauline Hope Cheong), Religion, Violence and the Media (with Jolyon Mitchell), and Visual Culture and the Study of Religion (with Birgit Meyer).

“It’s possible,” says Professor Bradley Onishi, “to hold an enchanted secularity” if we stop thinking of secularism as mere rationalism. In this week’s podcast, we hear about the ways in which philosophy of religion has thought “with” religion rather than for or against religion. Tracing alternative models of secularity through Martin Heidegger, Geoges Bataille, and others, Onishi calls on us to rethink how the philosophy of religion can help religious studies find different ways to frame the categories of secular and religious. As a resource in the academy, he says, religions themselves provide ways to question our basic assumptions about what religion does for us and look at our normative assumptions about anew.

Transcription forthcoming.

This decade’s first episode of Discourse! is hosted by Vivian Asimos, with guests Aled Thomas and Michael Munnick. This time, the theme is “communication” – fittingly enough. The conversation covers stories about different models of Christianity among evangelical Trump supporters, the recent resurgence of the use of “cult” in popular media, Greta Thunberg as a charismatic leader and media’s downplaying of Islamic Solidarity in the Gambian justice minister’s genocide charge at the UN against Myanmar.

Read the current events sources discussed in today’s episode here:

• https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/christian-right-worships-donald-trump-915381/
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/emotional-incontinents-like-trump-cannot-cope-with-greta-thunberg-controlled-anger
• https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-rohingya-world-court-gambia/with-memories-of-rwanda-the-gambian-minister-taking-on-suu-kyi-idUKKBN1Y91HR

The United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in a key religious freedom case, Espinoza v. Department of Revenue, in January 2020. In that case, the Court will decide whether a taxpayer-funded scholarship program can, even indirectly, fund a private religious school. The case has ignited a debate about no-aid clauses to religion in state constitutions and, more broadly, the separation of church and state. But is it possible ever truly to separate church and state? And how do courts decide what is religious–and therefore separable from government?

In this podcast, noted religious liberty lawyers Maggie Garrett (Americans United for Separation of Church and State) and Jennifer Hawks (BJC) discuss the Espinoza case before diving into other pivotal, recent decisions–including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, and Employment Division v. Smith–that raise questions about how courts define religion and religious freedom. We discuss how claims for religious exemptions offer insight into operating definitions of religion and the ways those definitions are predicated on sincerely held beliefs and/or actions (whether those actions take place within the four walls of a house of worship or beyond those walls). In other words, what do religious exemptions tell us about what counts as “truly” religious? Are beliefs alone protected? Or behaviors too? And how does a Court decide whether it has the authority to grant an exemption to a neutrally applicable rule or to forbid actions linked to sincerely held beliefs, religious or not? Along the way we discuss taxes and religion, dignitary harm, the “religious marketplace” and more.

Religious studies scholars (and policy experts) Susan Hayward and Peter Mandaville join the Religious Studies Project for Discourse in December 2019. They discuss how classifying conflicts as religious or not can clarify–or obscure–the complexities of those conflicts. The conversation includes examples from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the United States.

News stories referenced include:

https://m.khaleejtimes.com/uae/abu-dhabi/tolerance-is-the-only-way-to-peace-say-world-leaders-

https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/442726/Tehran-raps-U-S-interference-in-China-s-affairs

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-world-court-quotebox/demonstrations-mark-case-against-myanmar-at-u-n-s-world-court-idUSKBN1YE1TD

http://www.ft.lk/front-page/BBS-to-disband-after-General-Elections/44-689999

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/us/politics/trump-antisemitism-executive-order.html

In this episode, Professor Molly Bassett, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University, speaks about her program’s efforts to develop applied religious studies master’s certificates in “Religion and Aging” and “Nonprofit Management.” Her department’s partnerships with GSU’s Gerontology Institute as well as the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies reveal a progressive approach to professionalization of religious studies degree programs. Within recent conversations about the threat of humanities and liberal arts programs at many universities, the applied approach at GSU offers many benefits, not only in developing inter-university faculty and program partnerships, but also for recruiting majors and successfully showing how the skills of a religious studies degree can be vital for a student’s career aspirations.

In the popular imaginary, Israel/Palestine is – and has always been – a contested territory, associated with sacred sites, the ‘Abrahamic’ religions, religion-related conflicts, and a volatile political climate. However, this unnuanced stereotype takes little account of the lived realities on the ground, particularly among the constituency at focus in today’s podcast, a large group of around 860,000 ‘secular’ millennials, who have come of age during a phase of national conflict when some Palestinian and Israeli government leaders, and not just fringe figures, have utilized religio-ethnic symbols to motivate and divide.

In this podcast, Chris Cotter is joined by Dr Stacey Gutkowski to discuss what it means to be a ‘secular Jewish Israeli millennial’. What insights might the study of religion and secularity gain from taking a closer look at this constituency? Does it even make sense to refer to them as a constituency? How do they relate to Judaism, to Israel, and to Palestine? And much more…

Unbelief has often been defined as either ignorance or rejection of religious systems, but this week’s guests David Herbert and Josh Bullock see far more diversity in the ways one can be nonreligious. Sharing lessons from their project “Reaching for a new sense of connection? Towards a deeper understanding of the sociality of generation y non-believers in northern and Central Europe,” we hear about a more nuanced phenomenon of unbelief, where a diverse array of positions are constantly anchored, defined, and recreated in social settings. Collected from nationwide surveys, social media, and interview data, the project presents the tendencies of nonreligious young adults in the UK, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Poland, and Romania.

One of the takeaways from this podcast is that unbelief has widespread national differences as reflected in analysis of social media, but regional similarities from historical contexts show the effects of wider geo-political alignments. For example, in the Netherlands, Norway, and Eastern Germany non-religious people are more likely to express no interest in religious matters, while in Poland and Romania people vocally expressed their unbelief in politicized ways. For more perspectives on Hebert and Bullock’s project, visit https://newsenseofconnection.blog/

In this week’s podcast, Skidmore College Professor Bradley Onishi speaks about Straight White American Jesus, a podcast he co-hosts with Dan Miller that blends insider religious experience with academic expertise about American Evangelicalism. “The goal is never reduction,” Onishi argues about the mix of insider/outsider frames. Instead, he shares how the podcast tries to provide better access to complex religious worlds and how careful historical framing and rigorous critical analysis can humanize rather than demonize evangelicals. Looking honestly at religion, warts and all, is worth the effort since it leads us to increased religious literacy outcomes designed to understand the “human condition writ large.”