The Religious Studies Project

Alongside the problematic dominant caricature of Islam as a violent religion, there is perhaps no other issue so problematic in contemporary Western discourse on Islam than discussions sexuality and gender. Western stereotypes of the downtrodden Muslim woman are often countered by the claims of Islamic scholars that women are more liberated, respected and secure within Islam than in other religions or in the “secular” West. Regular listeners to The Religious Studies Project will be unsurprised to learn that there is a lot more going on below the surface of these dominant discourses. Why are “we” even having this discussion about sexual ethics and Islam? How might one begin to study such a vast and “problematic” topic? What are some of the most prescient issues that recur in this contested field? And what is the broader significance of this discussion for Religious Studies in general? To discuss these issues and more, Chris is joined this week by Professor Kecia Ali, of Boston University.

Check out a recent lecture by Kecia on sexual ethics and Islam here.

Evangelicalism in Peru has become a driving force in politics and decision making across major subjects, such as gender-related policies and institutional power. But it’s relevance today in the current political landscape is only the result of a much larger process, one that started around the end of the nineteenth century, with the entrance of the first protestant denominations and the establishment of their grassroots across the country. In this podcast, professor Juan Fonseca aims to elaborate a brief history of Protestantism, in order to comprehend its current mainstream manifestation.

People use both natural and supernatural explanations to explain various happenings all over the world. If a bridge collapses, who’s responsible? Is this a fortuitous event or the product of a higher purpose? It is quite common in certain communities to report the experience of God working in an individuals life, and personal experience is often used as testimony in establishing the reality of a particular supernatural agent. The inquisitive mind will ask: What can science say about supernatural attributions? Does scientific evidence have any bearing at all on the existence of a God or gods? In this podcast, Thomas J. Coleman III interviews Dr. Luke Galen on his latest theoretical work (preprint available here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ech9x/), which combines evidence from across the psychological sciences to address how natural processes influence attributions of supernatural agency.

We spend a lot of time on the Religious Studies Project discussing Religious Studies as a discipline or field of study, what it means to study ‘religion’ with or without quotation marks, and what exactly it is that the critical, scholarly study of societal discourses surrounding ‘religion’ might have to offer. However, up until today we have never tackled head-on the institutional location of Religious Studies within a higher education environment that is becoming increasingly stretched, and dominated by market forces and political whims. In particular, how might this situation affect graduate education it the study of ‘religion’? What can scholars of ‘religion’ do about this situation? Are we powerless? Must we simply sit on the sidelines and stick to our guns, or are there constructive alternative ways forward? To discuss these questions, and and an exciting new graduate programme looking at Religion in Culture.I am joined today by Drs Merinda Simmons and Michael Altman, both of the University of Alabama.

Blog post about the course: https://religion.ua.edu/blog/2016/12/theres-a-new-m-a-in-town/

Details of the course: http://religion.ua.edu/MA.html

Thank you Charles Schulz!

A therapist, a chaplain, a guru, a psychoanalyst, a missionary, a university counselor: how do these figures interact? In a milieu where meditations take place as part of church services and mental health services incorporate a spiritual dimension, the relationship between religion and the ‘psy’ disciplines – psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy – bears thinking about.

In this podcast, Dr. Christopher Harding uses his research on psychoanalysis and Buddhism in modern Japan to tackle the two-way dialogue between religion and the psy-disciplines. How have these shaped each other, and what are tensions between them?

Ever wonder what it’s like to complete the dissertation to first book process? How people find publishers? How much the publisher and editor influence the project? This podcast offers a roundtable discussion where six scholars discuss these questions and more. All six published some version of their dissertation, and they have unique insights and anecdotes to help explain and illuminate this process.

Politics and social institutions are inseparable. Whether we take a look at small-scale or complex societies, we can find that politics is involved with economics, kinship with hierarchy, and of course, religion with the state. The relationship between the last two has been shaped by numerous processes throughout human history; but, if we place our attention in the history of the western world, we can identify a turning point, one that started with the first waves of enlightened thought (eighteenth century), continuing with the posterior massive drop-out of catholic religiosity, and culminating with the total separation of religion and the state. In this podcast, Sidney Castillo interviews professor Marco Huaco Palomino as he addresses the nuances of secularity in several Latin American countries.

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Religion and gender violence is, an undesirable yet critical area of research in the field of religious studies. Violence inflicted against people of all gender and sexual orientations comes in numerous forms, and is something to which many faiths are connected in some way. In this podcast Dr Caroline Blyth discusses her research on ‘theologies of rape’ and gender violence as enacted against males and masculinity, particularly within the Christian Church. Blyth also discusses her upcoming edited series Rape Culture, Gender Violence and Religion (edited with Dr Emily Colgan and Dr Katie Edwards). In latter part of the interview, Blythe is joined by a contributor to the series who discusses his experience in the LGBTI community and how that has impacted his academic work in the volume. The two also discuss their involvement with Hidden Perspectives at the University of Auckland, a project that provides a platform for LGBTI student voices within the Faculty of Arts teaching and research community.

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 academic texts, Everlasting Gobstoppers, and more.

Yoga, in its modern form, should be of great interest to scholars of religion. While it certainly has roots in Vedic culture, the vast majority of Western practitioners do not see it as “religious”, but rather to do with health or “well-being”. Yoga’s status as religious has been in court, but nevertheless it continues to be practised in business, schools and, as Bruce Sullivan tells us, museums.

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 academic texts, Gruyère cheese, and more.

Religious freedom is an inherently good thing, right? It’s a cherished idea that is easy for state governments to enact, no? In this interview, Finbarr Curtis questions both of these assertions. In The Production of American Religious Freedom, Curtis argues that religious freedom is a fluent and malleable concept that people deploy for various and competing reasons. Curtis uses several case studies to illustrate how the rhetoric of religious freedom has no coherent logic. This discussion has both legal and political implications, as it concludes that one of modernity’s most important concepts—religious freedom—is both unobtainable and undesirable.