Race

Harm, AI, and Religion | Discourse! June 2023

Podcast
In our final #RSPdiscourse of the season, editor Andie Alexander, Craig Martin, and Paul-François Tremlett consider the concept of "harm" & religion in recent legislation, Scotland elections, and AI & Religion.

What’s Sincerity Got to Do With American Secularism?

Podcast
Join Matt Sheedy and Charles McCrary as they discuss a cultural history of "sincerely held religious beliefs." McCrary explores how SCOTUS has determined who and what gets to count as 'religious' and traces the historical development of American secularism. Be sure to tune in!

What’s Happening Down Under? | Discourse! May 2023

Podcast
RSP discourse heads Down Under once again as 2/3 of the usual suspects—Carole Cusack & Raymond Radford—discuss religion, politics, life and death in the Australian religious sphere. Be sure to tune in!

Keep Hope Alive: Preparing for White Christian Nationalism

Podcast
Tune in this week with Raymond Radford and Bradley Onishi as they discuss white Christian nationalism, evangelicalism, the Jan. 6 insurrection, and much more!

Critical Approaches to Studying Religion in Film

Podcast
Ting Guo chats with Rebekka King and Tenzan Eaghall about their new edited volume, Representing Religion in Film (Bloomsbury 2022), and they explore the “ideological blindspot” of existing studies on religion and film, have a listen!

Nothing Is Perfect, but Is Anything New?

Response
K. Merinda Simmons nuances and furthers Jason Josephson Storm's episode from Season 11 by reflecting critically on the ways in which postmodernism is explicitly—or even implicitly—dismissed in religious studies scholarship.

Unruly Women: Neocolonialism, Race, and Discrimination

Podcast
For our first episode of Season 12, Falguni A. Sheth joins RSP editor Andie Alexander to discuss issues of liberalism, racial discrimination, religious freedom, and governance with regard to Muslim women of color and Black Muslim women in the US.

Abortion, Climate Change Protests, & Ukraine Invasion | Discourse! May 2022 (with video)

Podcast
Tune in for our new Discourse! episode with Carmen Becker, Susannah Crockford, and Savannah Finver as they discuss legal issues of rights, abortion, protests, and more!

Curanderismo Roundtable

Podcast
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? Tune in with Andie Alexander, Israel L. Domínguez, Brett Hendrickson, and Jennifer Koshatka Seman for the RSP's first episode on curanderismo!

Obeah and Experiments with Power

Podcast
What happens when we reframing spiritual practices as an "experiment with power"? This week, J. Brent Crosson joins Ray Kim to discuss how we can challenge conventional understandings of religion and law in modern nation-states. Be sure to tune in!

How Critical Race Theory became a Moral Panic | Discourse! June 2021 (with video)

Podcast
For our final episode of Season 10, join Andie Alexander, Ishanika Sharma, and K. Merinda Simmons as they talk all things Critical Race Theory—or at least what can be covered in one episode!

Rethinking Narratives of ‘American Values’ in the US Military

Response
Jessica Cooperman writes that Stahl's work demonstrates how racism shapes religious institutions and argues that "it points to the necessity of re-examining American narratives of religious freedom through the analytical lenses of both race and gender."

Sovereignty, Historical Memory, and the Importance of Aliite Worldviews

Response
"The processes by which the Aliites imagine their history reveal much about how state sanctioned ideas and institutions gain and maintain seeming natural validity," writes Chernoh Sesay, Jr., in response to our interview with Spencer Dew on the Aliites.

The Secret Life of Scriptures: Black Scriptures as Tending to New Afro-Futures

Response
In Joseph L. Tucker Edmond's response to our interview with Richard Newton, we see a continuation of the extended, organic metaphors of Newton's scriptural lens for studying Alex Haley's Roots. What does it mean to tend a future, asks Tucker Edmonds, and who tends the futures for Black subjects?

Decolonizing the Study of Religion

Podcast
How can the field address its whiteness and the legacy of its colonial origins? In this final episode of our 2019/2020 season Christopher Cotter speaks with Malory Nye about decolonizing Religious Studies.

Imagining American and Japanese Religious Freedom

Response
"Diversity often lets us realize that we have limited our scope with no deliberation," writes Satoko Fujiwara in this response to Episode 332. "Regarding the study of Japanese religions," she continues, "diversity is even more necessary because scholars in the field have largely consisted of only two groups: Japanese scholars and white Westerners. It is too often as if only “white” scholars have the freedom to study anything and everything."

Race, Religious Freedom & Empire in Post-War Japan

Podcast
Jolyon Thomas talks American Empire, Racialization, and Religion in Post-War Japan with Brett Esaki at the 2019 AAR Conference in San Diego, CA.

The Politics of Religious Freedom and the Criminalization of Blackness

Response
Bishop Brathwaite’s story points out to us the degree to which the ghostly histories of enslaved and colonized peoples continue to haunt the present from the graves of colonial infrastructures and through repurposed modes of colonial regulation. We can include in this the category of religion and its promised freedom as sites for such hauntings as well

America’s Changing Religious Landscape

Podcast
The religious landscape of the United States is changing dramatically. Americans must consider what it means to govern a nation of religious minorities. We interview Dr. Robert P. Jones, the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. Jones discusses findings from PRRI's national surveys on religion and public life, many of which are represented in the American Values Atlas. The data collected by PRRI reveal a number of surprising trends related to religion and its intersection with politics, voting patterns, age, race, immigration, and secularism in the United States. A few key findings highlighted in PRRI's 2016 report on America's changing religious identity and covered in this podcast: (1) white Christians now account for fewer than half of the public, (2) white evangelical Protestants are in decline, (3) non-Christian religious groups are growing, and (4) atheists and agnostics account for a minority of all religiously unaffiliated. We discuss the implications of these findings and more, and we briefly review the research methodologies utilized by PRRI.

Black Religious Movements and Religio-Racial Identities during the Great Migration

Podcast
In this podcast, Judith Weisenfeld talks to Brad Stoddard about her new book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Depression. In this book, Weisenfeld explores several social groups in the early 1900s who combined religious and racial rhetoric to fashion new identities.

On Reading Ralph Ellison Theologically

Response
Most scholars examining invisibility in Ellison’s novel consider it a social metaphor: the novel’s protagonist is made invisible by people’s refusal to really see him. Yet Harriss claims invisibility is also a theological trope, with roots in biblical materials, Protestantism, and Kongo traditions, antecedents that establish it as an unmarked religious category. More than the social marginalization of black bodies, Harriss contends invisibility is metaphysical, too.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology

Podcast
By claiming the invisible not simply as a materialist term but a metaphysical one as well, Harriss contends that despite—or even because of—his status as a thoroughly “ secular” novelist and critic, Ellison’s writing reflects important theological trends and issues that mark his age and the cultural inheritances of his literary production.

Can Religion Explain the KKK?

Response
While Baker’s interventions regarding the need to take seriously the “religion” of the Klan is noted, I question whether she does not herself reinforce problematic epistemological and methodological assumptions about “religion.” Describing the story of the Ku Klux Klan as “lovely”, as Kelly Baker does in her interview with David Lewis, is initially perplexing. Fortunately, Baker goes on to clarify what she intends, ...

Hyphenating Identities

Response
We find ourselves in a time when countries like the UK and the US are, even now, officially providing their citizens the option of identifying via the use of hyphenated ethnicities. In yet another excellent Religious Studies Project interview, we hear from University of California Santa Barbara Associate Professor Rudy Busto talking about race and religion in the United States.

Race and Religion: Intertwined Social Constructions

Podcast
In this interview, we focus the topic of race: particularly how it has been examined (and ignored) in the field of religious studies, how it has been confused with ethnicity, how race and religion have been theorized as mutually constitutive, limitations and occlusions in the study of race and religion, and why race is a category scholars of religion cannot afford to ignore.
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