David McConeghy is an independent researcher living outside Boston. Since 2019 he has served as Co-Editor and Co-Host of the RSP. He has taught world religions, American religious history, and ethics at Chapman University in Orange, California, as well as Salem State University and Springfield College in Massachusetts. He runs an infrequent blog on religious theory and newsletter focusing on the issues of teaching religious studies off the tenure track. His research looks the presentation of sacred and secular as they appear in popular culture and religious discourses. In practice this has meant writing about how charismatic Christians use prayer to make sacred space and how video games can re-inscribe secular approaches to death. You can follow him at Twitter @dmcconeghy.
This RSP Remix answers the question "What is the world religions paradigm?" with an abridged version of our 2013 interview with James Cox.
In the first RSP Remix, Dave McConeghy guides us through recent RSP discussions of fieldwork and its impact on scholarship. This episode features excerpts from conversations with Christopher R. Cotter, Spencer Dew, Liz Bucar, Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Robin Veldman, Elizabeth Pérez, and Cristina Rocha.
It's a bumper episode of Discourse this month, as four (count them, four!) RSP editors sit down to discuss how the media are talking about religion this month. First, Breann, David, and Dave introduce Andie as the RSP's new Managing Editor, before we discuss mass COVID cremations in India, a new synagogue at the site of a Nazi massacre in the Ukraine, protests over a new telescope in Hawaiʻi, and the scandal over the remains of the victims of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. It's not our most lighthearted episode.
From counting money to lifting four-ton statues, Italian Catholics in Brooklyn have a robust, embodied language to express their masculine devotion says Prof. Maldonado-Estrada in this interview about her new book, Lifeblood of the Parish.
How were 4th century Christian martyr shrines locations for the negotiation of power and diversity? In this interview, Nathaniel Morehouse explains the contested nature of these shrines.
Evangelicals don't oppose climate activism for the reasons you think. Listen to expert Robin Veldman and find out why "embattlement" matters more than eschatology when it comes to rejecting climate science.
What do Muslims, Mormons, and Satanists have in common? Megan Goodwin argues that for all three groups, sex scandals were used to paint religious groups as un-American and "bad" religion. Learn more about minoritization and its role in policing American identity in this week's episode.
Complex issues of race, identity, citizenship, sovereignty, and Law come together in this interview with Spencer Dew about the New Religious Movements surrounding Noble Drew Ali and the groups he inspired.
The diversity of Muslim environmentalisms shows the urgency of decolonizing Religious Studies and Environmental Humanities amid escalating global climate crises, says Prof. Anna Gade in this week's episode. Based on her decades of fieldwork in Indonesia, Dr. Gade sketches new intersections of religion and the environment that decenter conversations long dominated by Western ecological models.
James Baldwin's critique of America and its racism is an "urgent lesson" for contemporary America, writes Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. in his new book Begin Again.
10 years in the making! Celebrate our decade of scholarship with this special episode, "Thanks for listening!"
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.
What layers of complicity in colonialism are still embedded in the field of religious studies? How can we learn from decades of decolonial work in Native American and Indigenous Studies? Dr. Natalie Avalos speaks with RSP co-host David McConeghy about the urgency of decolonial scholarship to start the RSP's 10th season.
In this week's episode, John Lardas Modern discusses the genealogy and biopolitics of the scientific study of prayer from E.B. Tylor to DEVO.
Will #religiousliteracy save Religious Studies? At the 2019 AAR in San Diego, Dave McConeghy moderated a roundtable with early career scholars about the meaning of religious literacy in their context. Join us for a lively discussion about what it means to teach religious studies with Richard Newton, Chris Jones, Rebekka King, Jenna-Gray-Hildenbrand, Kevin Minister, and Bradly Onishi.
To honor May the Fourth, International Star Wars Day, please enjoy this compilation of classic Religious Studies Project interviews about Star Wars!
Are boxers' religious affiliations only as skin deep as their tattoos? Find out in this conversation about boxing and religious identity with Prof. Arlene Sanchez Walsh by David McConeghy.
In this conversation with Dr. Benji Rolsky, we learn how the public square became the ideological focus of American liberal strategies in the 1970s and beyond thanks to the efforts of media figures like Norman Lear.
In this episode, journalist Katherine Stewart, author of a new book about religious nationalism called The Power Worshippers, shares her perspective on the religio-political struggle for the power to shape American life today.
Find out about the founding of the new journal American Religion with editors Sarah Imhoff and Cooper Harris
Is Religious Literacy social justice? In this week's podcast with Professor Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, she discusses the University of Vermont’s new “Religious Literacy for Professionals” certificate and why religious studies does vital work for the academy.
In this week's podcast, we speak with Bradley Onishi about the ways in which philosophy of religion has thought "with" religion rather than for or against religion. "It's possible," he says, "to hold an enchanted secularity" if we think about religions themselves as tools for questioning our basic assumptions about the world.
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.”
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.
In today’s podcast, Professor R. Andrew Chesnut connects Brazil’s colonial past to its pluralist present and explains why folk saint devotion to Santa Muerte or Lady Death is one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world.
There’s always another thing to see as data for religious studies, but widening the boundary for what counts as data comes with a price. Every new category is a multiplication. When your choices are infinite, then explaining your choices becomes an obligation.
This interview with Craig Martin explores the limits of identity formation under modern Capitalism. Martin's work Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie focuses on the ways in which culture and religion are produced for consumption.
Aaron Hughes (University of Rochester) has been a vocal critic of some of the theories and methods used by religious studies scholars working on Islam. In this podcast, he discusses his critique of the discipline and practice of religious studies he has made through works such as Situating Islam (Equinox, 2008), Theorizing Islam (Equinox, 2012), Abrahamic Religions (Oxford, 2012), The Study of Judaism (SUNY, 2013), and, most recently, Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity (Equinox, 2015).
The project of legitimating new cultural commodities into the canon of interpretative objects can be lengthy process. In this interview with University of North Carolina at Greensboro Associate Professor Greg Grieve, video games are presented as a content moving from the margins to the center of the intersection of religion and popular culture.
I find it our duty to walk the line that holds us from letting the veracity of a claim dictate our field’s observational models or orientations. A single informant’s truth is anecdote, not evidence. Seven or so minutes into David Robertson’s interview with Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal, Kripal cuts to the heart of an issue that plagues contemporary religious studies scholars: Do we have the tools and will to seriously examine experiences of the fantastic in the present age?
What do we do when our access to documents is contingent on our neutrality? How much of what we can say about the rise of the Religious Right is similarly hindered by restrictions of speech or limited by access to sensitive personal documents? This week’s interview with Florida State University Assistant Professor Michael McVicar highlights two important, but competing elements of recent work on Christian conservatism...
In this interview, Molly Bassett begins by introducing us to the world of Middle America, the sources scholars use today to study this period and its cultures, and then describes the benefits and challenges of teaching with Meso-American materials. Her students learn not only to challenge the categories scholars use to describe religious ideas like "god," ...
In this wide-ranging interview with A. David Lewis, comic books are presented as an irreplaceable cultural medium for engaging with issues of mortality, identity, subjectivity, and cosmology. With an overwhelming slate of comic book driven television series (Walking Dead, Gotham, ...
When the past has provided us as many truly excellent documents as early modern Europe has on witchcraft and possessions, what need have we to inject ourselves into their discussions? In this interview with Philip Almond, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Queensland and Deputy Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, listeners are treated to a wide-ranging survey of the past decade of Almond’s work on witchcraft and demonic possession in early modern England.
How should one approach the study of demons and spiritual warfare? In this conversation with University of North Carolina, Charlotte professor Sean McCloud, demons, possessions, and exorcisms that might have once been considered fringe or marginal elements of the American religious scene are now part of a robust “haunted” or supernatural landscape.
What does it mean to teach or research religious studies digitally? Does religious "data" make digital religious studies distinct within the digital humanities? What is a digital religious studies research project you think more people should know about? How can departments and the field better support digital methods and pedagogies? Six scholars gathered at the AAR's groundbreaking THATCamp to discuss these questions and more!
"[My dissertation] in Religious Studies [...] begins with the premise that the built environment has been over-emphasized to the detriment of other modes of creating and maintaining sacred space." Let me begin with a mythological allusion. The Roman god Janus was often depicted with two faces to signify his interstitial nature. He looked into the future and past, and oversaw beginnings and endings.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The views expressed in podcasts, features and responses are the views of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Religious Studies Project or our sponsors. The Religious Studies Project is produced by the Religious Studies Project Association (SCIO), a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (charity number SC047750).
