The Religious Studies Project Master Archive

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.

For our eighth(!) annual special, Only Sixty Seconds returns! This time, Chris Cotter is your host, as David G. Robertson returns to defend his 2018 crown against Bettina Schmidt, Douglas Davies and Theo Wildcroft. We may not have avoided repetition, but I do not hesitate in promising you no deviation from hilarity!

Thanks to our audience for being so encouraging, to our sponsors and patrons for making this possible, and to you – Thanks for Listening!

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

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.”

Chris Cotter is joined by Susannah Crockford and Sierra Lawson in this month’s edition of discourse, discussing college football politics in Alabama, Donald Trump’s new ‘spiritual adviser’, a Day of the Dead/Dia de Muertos memorializing migrants who have died at the US border, Armistice/Remembrance/Veterans’ day rituals, and the recent controversy surrounding QR codes at the AAR-SBL.

Links to stories here:

• Day of the Dead: https://thehill.com/latino/468320-hispanic-caucus-dedicates-day-of-the-dead-altar-to-migrants-who-died-in-us-custody
• Paula White: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-spiritual-adviser-paula-white-prays-against-presidents-opponents-suggests-they-operate-1470197 and more background on her here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/paula-white-trump.html and here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/us/politics/paula-white-trump.html
• QR codes: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/11/scholars-religion-and-biblical-literature-object-having-conference-badges-coded-and#.XclZwaMMtqY.twitter
• Football: https://www.al.com/news/2019/11/alabama-sga-warns-groups-protest-trump-during-lsu-game-risk-losing-reserved-seating.html

Stigmata are a special kind of miraculous event. They involve the physical manifestation of Jesus’ wounds as depicted in the Bible Gospels. Though many people in history have claimed to bear these marks, they have also been used as proof of the existence of God or to build legitimacy for a religious community. Those who have studied stigmata include investigators from the Catholic Church, religious skeptics, and medical professionals.

This week’s podcast with Gabor Klaniczay focuses on the final group, doctors. In his research on stigmata during the 19th and 20th century in Europe, Klaniczay analyzes how the medical discourse has tried to establish authenticity for stigmata cases. Discourses differed based on religious affiliation with Catholic doctors were more prone to credit them as proof of the supernatural, while Protestants ones were more skeptical, often trying to attribute them to hysteria, self-suggestion, or plain forgery.

Throughout the interview, Klaniczay refers to the social context in which stigmata occurred, as in the cases of Louise Lateau in 19th century Belgium and France, and Padre Pio in 20th century Italy. The first corresponded with a time of intense social change and secularization during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, while the second found correspondences with World War I and major processes in Italian politics. In this way, Klaniczay’s approach reflects Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau’s  research on the 17th century Loudun Possessions: miraculous or mystical events are the language in which the symptoms of social change take form.

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.

Following the “Thinking with Jonathan Z. Smith” Conference hosted by the Norwegian University for Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, Aaron W. Hughes, the conference’s keynote speaker, joined conference panelist Andie Alexander to discuss some of what was discussed during the conference and primarily the legacy of J.Z. Smith’s work for the field of religious studies.

The conference papers provided great examples of the application of Smith’s work across sub-fields and for religious studies pedagogy. But this wide application of Smith’s work also raised some questions not only about how scholars read and engage with his work but also about how we adapt and apply his work moving forward. Hughes reflects on the impact of Smith’s scholarship while also addressing critiques of his approach. Hughes contends that Smith left scholars of religion with a simple but impossible task of critically engaging and reflecting on one’s work while maintaining a playful, comparative approach.

In today’s podcast Professor R. Andrew Chesnut reflects on the broad changes in Latin America that show why Santa Muerte is one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world. By connecting Brazil’s colonial past to its pluralist present, Dr. Chesnut explains how folk saint culture connects the country’s diverse population of Catholic, Pentecostal, and Afro-Brazilian religious groups. Focusing on lived religious experiences, including Santa Muerte’s unofficial role in Day of the Dead in Mexico, this episode highlights the many different ways Lady Death operates for her devotees and reveals some of the ongoing challenges of studying the religion amid the rapidly changing religious landscape of the Global South today.

This panel, recorded at the EASR conference 2019 at the University of Tartu, is intended for PhD students and early career scholars who want to learn more about the publishing world. We encourage listeners to watch the video version of this week’s episode on YouTube, which has timestamps in the video description for the different questions answered by these experienced editors and publishers in their hour-long discussion.

On the panel chaired by Suzanne Owen were Michael Stausberg, Gregory D. Alles, Joshua Wells, Valerie Hall, Jenny Butler, and James White.

This event was organized by the Estonian Society for the Study of Religions and University of Tartu in cooperation with Religious Studies Project, and was supported by the European Regional Developmental Fund (through Enterprise Estonia). We thank them for their generous help to produce this resource.

Conservative discourse has had many faces in Latin America. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic Church had a monopoly, but was succeeded by the charismatic evangelical movements after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. As the Catholic Church took a more progressive turn, evangelical movements became the spokespersons for conservative views. Today, these discourses are being infused with scientific perspectives.

In this week’s podcast, Professor Jerry Espinoza Rivera explains how historical Latin American conservatism became neoconservatism. Though Latin America is diverse, conservatism has been a constant throughout the region’s history, intervening not only in the power plays of religious institutions, but also in the shaping of people’s everyday life conceptions of the world. Through a discussion of The Black Book of the New Left: Gender Ideology or Cultural Subversion by Argentinian authors Nicolás Marquez and Agustín Laje, Espinoza Rivera shows how neoconservatism has managed to influence these processes by developing a language of its own that blends “scientific” arguments with philosophical and historical analysis of the contemporary world political landscape. This language is popular among religious groups, including both Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Catholics today. Paradoxically, the diverse users of this language has generated a common tongue for anyone that wants to participate in current Latin American public arenas.

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.

David Robertson talks to Naomi Goldenberg in this episode of Are You My Data?, recorded at Leibniz University in Hannover. Topics include Naomi’s teaching strategies, some really useful time management and writing strategies, before the second half of the conversation moves to the critical study of religion. Why hasn’t the critical study of religion fundamentally changes the field in the twenty years since The Ideology of Religious Studies? How do we move the agenda on past the stage of simply deconstructing the category, and get the idea out beyond scholarly discourse?

You can download this interview here, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us. And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying academic texts, like Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty or Naomi Goldenberg’s Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions

The theme of the BASR conference 2019 was “Visualising Cultures: Media, Religion and Technology”. Vivian Asimos and Theodora Wildcroft took the opportunity to ask the delegates a few pertinent questions: what inspired them about the conference theme, their opinion about major trends in the discipline, and how they were personally feeling about REF 2021. Think of this as a ‘state of the discipline’ round up, as we come closer to the end of the year. With thanks to our participants: Suzanne Owen, Dawn Llewellyn, Bettina Schmidt, Jonathan Tuckett, Aled Thomas, Tim Hutchings, David Robertson, Stephen Brooks and Chris Cotter.

The allure of speaking on behalf of a dead personality or scholar is a constant impulse among their respective followers. Every now and then questions like “what would x think about the world we live in?” or “what did x exactly meant with this argument?” are thrown in debate rooms, the political arena, or specialized conferences on the relevance of a certain scholar. And while the answers to these questions continue to fill up edited volumes, social media feeds, or inspirational quotes for the day, the accuracy of these statements remain to be proven by the very persons who uttered them in the first place.

Fortunately, we are growing closer to a solution to this conundrum with the increasing development of artificial intelligence (a.i.). In this week’s podcast, Katrine Frøkjaer Baunvig discusses preliminary results from the research project “Waking the Dead”. This project aims to build an a.i. bot of Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), a Danish “secular saint” considered to be the father of modern Denmark, who contributed immensely into generating a national consciousness through his writings, both in a political and religious way.

Professor Baunvig explains how the research team went through by using the digitized works of Grundtvig with machine learning, into developing and algorithm and training it with the whole work corpus. Then they used word embedding to build semantic networks -a sort of conceptual blueprint for outlining Grundtvig’s worldview- and contextualized them using digitized newspapers of the time when he was alive. The expected result is to place the a.i. Grundtvig bot inside a look-alike robot that can interact with people in public settings such as the Danish National Museum by September 2022, the year of his 150th deathday.

The anthropological, sociological and philosophical reflections these future interactions with the public will be of much interest once we find out what people have to say about the accuracy of thought of this “resurrected” Danish thinker, but also, what this version of “Grundtvig” has to say about the current state of affairs of Danish society, and the world overall. Regardless of the result, one thing is for sure, both sides will honor Grundtvig’s idea of the “living word”: using the spoken act of communication as the best means to convey each other’s ideas.

Religious freedom has emerged in recent years as a pivotal topic for the study of religion. It is also the subject of heated debates within many countries and among human rights advocates globally, where competing groups advance radically different ideas about how religious freedom operates and what it protects. While for marginalized and minority communities, this freedom can provide important avenues of appeal, at the same time, governing regimes of religious freedom have most often served the interests of those in power and opened up new channels of coercion by the state.

This conversation with Tisa Wenger, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, starts with the question of how religious freedom talk functions to shape the category of religion and to transform what counts as religious in the modern world. Using Wenger’s ethnographic and historical research on the Pueblo Indians, we discuss how local, national, and international regimes of religious freedom have shaped (or even produced) new religious formations, ways of being religious, norms of good vs. bad religion, or distinctions between the religious and the secular. In short, how has religious freedom (re)produced religion and its others in the modern world?

• Austerity and evangelical Christians: https://www.premierchristianity.com/Past-Issues/2018/June-2018/Faith-in-action-How-Christians-are-plugging-the-gap-left-by-austerity
• Mythology of Zelda https://youtu.be/3fr1Z07AV00
• Potential arson at Boleskine House https://wildhunt.org/2019/08/update-on-boleskine-house-arson.html

Since its inception, evolutionary theory has sought to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding biological processes and their degree of influence in the ecology of the behavior of living beings. Such an approach has managed to explain how the pressure mechanism of natural selection has allowed the emergence of biological systems that exhibit social behavior (e.g. ants, dolphins, and Hominidae in general). Yet, when trying to address the ever-increasing complexity that grows within the social and cultural evolution of different societies, this explanation does not suffice.

In this week’s podcast, professor Armin Geertz outlines an answer elaborating on the arguments presented in his co-authored book The Emergence and Evolution of Religion by Means of Natural Selection. He argues that there are multilevel selection processes that happen within different sociocultural formations, and these are key to understanding how religion has evolved throughout history.

He proposes 4 ways in which additional selection pressures occur, these are named after prominent names in the history of sociological thought: Spencerian type 1, Durkheimian, Spencerian type 2, and Marxian. Respectively, the first is related to group formation based symbolic identification, the second relates to the group competition that happens within an environmental niche, the third refers to when polities developed complex institutions capable of wide regional or global expansión, and the fourth is when in a society, there is discrimination against specific groups, which could lead to a revolution or to that group to be put down.

In all of these, religion plays a key role in articulating, contrasting, or supporting different ways of social engagement within a society and between societies as well. Understanding these mechanisms and the way they interplay with religion allows for a complementary framework derived from natural selection towards sociocultural evolution.

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.

This month on Discourse!, David Robertson, Suzanne Newcombe and Daniel Gorman, Jr. discuss some recent figures on religious change, in the UK and the US. We discuss how and why the term ‘cult’ is making a comeback, particularly in the US, and often in regard to Trump. This leads into a broader discussion about how religion is represented in the news media, and Suzanne has some suggestions for how to move this forward.

Links: Religion Media Centre: https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/ British Social Attitudes 2018: www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39293/1_bsa36_religion.pdf BBC Worldwide Religion & Ethics – Heart and Soul (short videos): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsn4/clips Sophia Smith Galer (BBC journalist): https://sophiasmithgaler.com/ Religious Education Council: https://www.religiouseducationcouncil.org.uk RE: Online Resources:  https://www.reonline.org.uk/ How millennials replaced religion with astrology and crystals UK secularism on rise as more than half say they have no religion The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity Justin Amash explains why the GOP is irredeemable

You can download this interview, and subscribe to receive our weekly podcast, on iTunes. If you enjoyed it, please take a moment to rate us. And remember, you can use our Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, or Amazon.ca links to support us at no additional cost when buying moisturiser, snoods, graphic novels and nematodes.

Asma Uddin is the author of When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America’s Fight for Religious Freedom. In this book, Uddin examines an alarming trend to redefine Islam as a political ideology, not a religion. In our conversation, we track the history of this movement to redefine Islam and its implications for the rights of Muslims. We discuss the widespread presumption among American progressives that courts tend to protect religious freedom for Christians, but not for Muslims, and we examine particular stories that support and problematize that narrative. In particular, Uddin provides vivid examples of how American courts have reacted to arguments that Islam is not a religion. Uddin explains how and why Muslims and their allies disagree about whether religious freedom laws offer (or should offer) necessary or sufficient legal frameworks for protecting the rights of religious minorities in the United States.

In the latter part of the conversation, we discuss Uddin’s approach to writing the book. She describes how she balanced the desires to better equip people who already acknowledge that Islam is a religion and, on the other hand, to convince those who view Islam only as a political ideology to change their minds.

This month on Discourse, Breann Fallon, Carole Cusack and Ray Radford approach the Australian news from a Religious Studies perspective. We cover the appeal of Cardinal George Pell, the drama around Israel Folau, and the impact of Christianity on the recent Australian federal election results.

Listeners to the Religious Studies Project, particularly in a European context, might be quite familiar with the sight of a former church building that has now turned derelict, or is being used for a purposes that perhaps it wasn’t intended for, or is being rejuvenated by another ‘religious’ community, another Christian community, or put to some other use. Chris is joined today by Daan Beekers to discuss spatial contestations and conversions, particularly looking at (former) church buildings in the Dutch context. We discuss some of the research projects he has been involved in, before looking at two particular case studies – the Fatih Mosque, and the Chassé Dance Studios – where Church ‘conversions’ have taken place. We discuss the various discursive entanglements surrounding these buildings, and the contested notions of heritage that come from different constituencies who are invested in their presence. Finally, we ask if there is anything necessarily ‘religious’ going on here… (Unsurprisingly, the answer is, ‘it’s complicated… but there’s nothing sui generis).

Listeners may be interested to check out Daan’s recent blog post, Converted Churches: Matters of Entanglement, Heritage and Home.

They are also encouraged to listen to our previous podcasts with Kim Knott on “Religion, Space and Locality” and Peter Collins on “Religion and the Built Environment.”

The use of source languages for the academic study of religion has had a long-standing presence in scholarly production. Especially useful in the comparative study of myth, philology has contributed in shedding light on the meaning of old texts and other written records of ancient civilizations, as well as finding linguistic convergences and contrasts among them.
In this week’s podcasts, Dr. Paola Corrente gives us insights in how the use of the philological approach can be beneficial for, not only providing a common and solid framework for comparative research but also, for providing more suitable ways of classification according to linguistic criteria. Her work on the “dying gods” –i.e. gods that die but come back to life– of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, which draws on the concept formulated by James George Frazer, provides a case for this exercise.
On the last segment of the interview, she opens a debate on how scholars of religion tend to reject classifications when studying religion comparatively. In this regard, she appeals tacitly to what another likeminded author has identified as “religiocentrism” (Diez de Velasco 2005), that is, the methodological bias that a researcher could have when studying other forms of religiosity or spirituality.