The Religious Studies Project

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.”

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.

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.