Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise include Religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism in Vietnam, Gender and Sexuality, Affect Theory, and Ethnography.

She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She also holds an M.Phil. in Religion and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women's and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, an M.A. in Comparative Religion from Iliff School of Theology, and a B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota Duluth.

She pursues projects that highlight the power and agency of everyday people. Religions are often a vital resource for grassroots social action and community engagement, as exemplified by Buddhism in Vietnam. Her projects have received generous grant support from the American Council of Learned Societies; Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA); and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies.

Swenson’s new book, Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam (Oxford UP, 2025) is one of the first major ethnographic studies on Buddhism in southern Vietnam, featuring new histories and interpretations of this rich subject.

It shares new context for how religious practices affect urban migration, development, and humanitarian concerns, and presents theoretical advancements for understanding grassroots charity. Near Light We Shine offers a diversity of perspectives on grassroots Buddhist practices throughout Vietnam, by featuring interviews that have never been published before from marginalized Buddhist practitioners in Vietnam, such as day laborers, queer men, elderly women, and retired communist soldiers.

References mentioned in the interview: 

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Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media (Oxford UP, 2025) offers a fresh account of evangelical power by uncovering how the American Tract Society (ATS) leveraged print media to spread its message across an expanding nation. One of the era's largest media corporations and a pillar of the benevolent empire, the ATS circulated some 5.6 billion printed pages between its founding in 1825 and the eve of the Civil War. It wasn't just the volume of materials that mattered—it was the sophisticated media infrastructure that evangelicals developed for their message to reach readers, coast to coast. Media infrastructure refers to the material assemblages that work below the surface of media content, including the format of publications, the avenues of their movement, and the circumstances surrounding their reading. As a non-coercive yet effective form of power, infrastructure shaped how, when, and why readers engaged with evangelical texts. While showing how the ATS became a formidable force in American society during the nineteenth century, Empire of Print opens larger questions about the entanglements among people, things, texts, and institutions, the dynamics of power in a media-saturated world, and the salience of race, class, and region in the distribution and reception of media.

Sonia Hazard is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website here

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All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together. Agency isn't the faculty of an individual entity or self; it's always the function of a network or assembly of actors. Second, many of the actors involved in these processes are nonhuman-things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach adopts a conception of action that doesn't hinge on mental states. To act is to participate in, contribute to, shape, facilitate, organize, constrain, and modify the course of events. This book argues that there's no such thing as an individual action and that agency is collectively distributed across a heterogeneous field of human and nonhuman actors.

For readers interested in the link between quantum physics and relational metaphysics, please check out this recorded talk, especially Rovelli's linked here

You can also check out his book Helgoland. For a more detailed analysis of why substance metaphysics fail us, see, The Non-Existence of the Real World.

For readers interested in wuwei (non-coercive self-organizing communities in nature), please check out Honeybee Democracy, Biocivilisations, and FLUKE.

About the urgency of building a non-cruel optimism, check out the classic critique of neoliberal individualism: Cruel Optimism and Psychopolitics and Burnout society.

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Author Noam Sienna unveils a vast Sephardic world created by these books. This literary network transcended geographical boundaries, connecting Jewish communities from Fez and Tunis to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Livorno. By examining cultural centers and tracing the journey of these texts, Sienna provides depth to our understanding of a remarkably global and worldly book culture, and its evolving role in the growth of Jewish modernity.
While the content of Jewish books has long fascinated scholars, Jewish Books in North Africa shifts our focus to the physical context. These books were not isolated artifacts; they were embedded in cultural networks during a period of religious, political, and cultural transformation. Sienna's work sheds light on the intricate interplay between books and the dynamic world in which they existed.

Noam Sienna is the Jerome and Lorraine Aresty Visiting Scholar in Jewish Book Arts at the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers-New Brunswick. He received his PhD in History and Museum Studies from the University of Minnesota and is also a Senior Fellow with the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His monograph received the 2025 Book Award from the Middle East Librarians Association.

Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939.

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Dr. Tomer Persico is a Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Rubinstein Fellow at Reichman University, and a Senior Research Scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His fields of expertise include contemporary spirituality, Jewish modern identity, Jewish renewal, and forms of secularization and religiosity in Israel.

In God’s Image, Persico examines the central role that the idea that all people were created in the image of God played in the development of Western civilization. Focusing on five themes―selfhood, freedom, conscience, equality, and meaning―the book guides the reader through a cultural history of the West, from ancient times through modernity. It explains how each of these ideals was profoundly influenced by the central biblical conception of humanity’s creation in God’s image, embracing an essential equality among all people, while also emphasizing each human life’s singularity and significance.

The book argues that the West, and particularly Protestant Christianity, grew out of ideas rooted deeply in this notion, and that it played a core role in the development of individualism, liberalism, human rights discourse, and indeed the secularization process. Making the case for a cultural understanding of history, the volume focuses on ideas as agents of change and challenges the common scholarly emphasis on material conditions. Offering an innovative perspective on the shaping of global modernity, In God’s Image examines the relationship between faith and society and posits the fundamental role of the idea of the image of God in the making of the moral ideals and social institutions we hold dear today.

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The Jain tradition, with roots in ancient India but now spread across the globe, is anything but static and monolithic. In Engaged Jainism, an interdisciplinary cohort of academics and practitioners explore the manifold ways in which Jains and Jain ideas become engaged in social worlds—historically, philosophically, philologically, and anthropologically. Following the legacy of Engaged Buddhism, the groundbreaking volume edited by Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, this volume shows how Jain traditions become engaged in everyday life, puts Jain ideas in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, and examines the ways in which Jains have maintained Jain identity in their engagement with other religious traditions and cultural influences in the past and present. Across all of these disciplinary approaches, Jainism emerges as a dynamic, protean, and diverse tradition.

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God's mission is to reclaim the world. The church has a designated role to play. Most Christians would agree that the Bible provides a basis for mission. Christopher Wright boldly maintains that the entire Bible is generated by and is all about God's mission. In order to understand the Scriptures, we need a missional hermeneutic, an interpretive perspective in sync with the beating heart of its great mission. Wright gives a new hermeneutical perspective on Scripture through an understanding of:

In this revised edition of The Mission of God, Wright extends his classic discussion to consider the ways that the conversation on missional hermeneutics has developed since its original publication. With fully updated citations and additional chapters focused on gospel-centered holistic mission and on the issue of election and supersessionism, this new edition addresses the questions, criticisms, and insights that have emerged during the intervening two decades.

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A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth century
A popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is somehow inherent to religion, to which political secularism offers a liberating solution. But this assumption ignores a glaring modern reality: that putatively progressive regimes committed to secularism have possessed just as much and often a vastly greater capacity for violence as those tied to a religious identity. In Broken Altars, Thomas Albert Howard presents a powerful account of the misery, deaths, and destruction visited on religious communities by secularist regimes in the twentieth century.
Presenting three principal forms of modern secularism that have arisen since the Enlightenment—passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism—Howard argues that the latter two have been especially violence-prone. Westerners do not fully grasp this, however, because they often mistake the first form, passive secularism, for secularism as a whole. But a disconcertingly more complicated picture emerges with the adoption of a broader global vision. Admitting different species of secularism, greater historical perspective, and case studies drawn from the former Soviet Union, Turkey, Mexico, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Mongolia, and China, among other countries, Howard calls into question the conventional tale of modernity as the pacifying triumph of secularism over a benighted religious past.

Thomas Albert Howard is professor of humanities and history and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University. He is the author of many books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Ecclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." As part of a search for enduring meaning, it questions the nature of work, mortality, happiness, justice, goodness, and life itself. Abounding with careful observations, disappointments, and insights, Ecclesiastes is one of the richest and most complex books in all of Tanakh. 

Join us as we speak with Erica Brown, whose commentary offers a fresh and hopeful look at this ancient book, as she synthesizes rabbinic commentary with modern scholarship, fine art, and poetry. 

Dr. Erica Brown is the Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and the founding director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks–Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership.

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at [email protected].

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Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation.

Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.

This book is open access, you can find the download link here. You can find the statistics and social network analysis in this book as well as links to Prof. Mazanec's codes in this book. 

You can find the online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation here. 

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